


shooting stars, falling objects

by orphan_account



Category: Inception (2010), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Dreams, F/M, Filed under: things I have no excuse for, Gen, Inception AU, M/M, Multi, Prompt Fic, mind-screw, random cameos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-18
Updated: 2012-09-16
Packaged: 2017-11-05 14:38:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 45,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/407570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Inception,” Steve says, “is an art.  It isn’t like extraction—it’s not that simple.  It’s deeper than that.  Rawer.  More intimate.  Extraction is just pulling knowledge out of someone’s mind.  It’s easy.  Impersonal.  These days we’ve got it worked down to almost an exact science.  But inception, inception’s different.  It’s not exact. It’s not a guarantee.”</i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>“Oh god,” Tony says, and he’s rolling his eyes behind his sunglasses, Steve can tell.  “It’s not a hot babe, Steve, stop talking about it like you want to bend it over the table and—” </i></p><p> <i>“If this is going to work,” Steve continues, ignoring Tony, “if you want it to stick, we need to know everything.”</i></p><p> <br/>Or, The Avengers, Inception style.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i

**Author's Note:**

> An Inception AU that began over on the kink meme under another title (Flicker), which has since been added to and refined and actually given a plot and direction, gasp! 
> 
> Super thanks to Leah for encouraging and editing this at light speed this morning! Also thanks to the OP who planted the idea in the first place, and everyone over on the meme who offered encouragement. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> The title is taken from Pablo Neruda's poem "Love," which is, as all of his work, stunning. If you can read Spanish I highly suggest reading it first that way, but of course the English translation is beautiful. 
> 
> Can also be found [~~here](http://zihna-zi.tumblr.com/post/28746608218/fic-shooting-stars-falling-objects-the-avengers) at my tumblr.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to the amazing [emiliana darling](http://emilianadarling.tumblr.com) for the awesome title page! It's fantastic!

[ ](http://s1173.photobucket.com/albums/r587/zihna-zi/?action=view&current=byemilianadarling.gif)

shooting stars, falling objects

 

“Inception,” Steve says, “is an art.  It isn’t like extraction—it’s not that simple.  It’s deeper than that.  Rawer.  More intimate.  Extraction is just pulling knowledge out of someone’s mind.  It’s easy.  Impersonal.  These days we’ve got it worked down to almost an exact science.  But inception, inception’s different _._ It’s not exact. It’s not a guarantee.”

“Oh god,” Tony says, and he’s rolling his eyes behind his sunglasses, Steve can tell.  “It’s not a hot babe, Steve, stop talking about it like you want to bend it over the table and—” 

“If this is going to work,” Steve continues, ignoring Tony, “if you want it to _stick,_ we need to know everything.”

The client leans closer.  “Everything?” he asks.  “What, exactly, is _everything?_ ”

“We need to know your brother better than anyone,” Steve explains, very carefully.  “Better than his friends, better than your parents, better than you, even.”

Thor Odinsson frowns.  “You mean _everything_. His whole life, our history.”

“Actually we know most of that already,” Tony chirps, tapping at his phone.  Steve, again, ignores him. 

“Yes,” Steve says.

Thor sighs heavily and he looks _sad,_ and from all the pictures they’ve gathered of him, prepping for this meeting, Steve’s never seen him sad.  Thor Odinsson is happy person.  This is a fundamental law of nature, it seems, like _puppies are cute_ and _Coulson is more coffee than human being_. 

Steve leans in, close, earnest.  Trustworthy, Tony’s told him, you just look _trustworthy._ “Thor,” he says.  “I promise you that we’ll do everything we can to help your brother.  But you have to let us in.”

And now Thor smiles, wide and big and brilliant.  “What do you need to know?”  

“Nailed it,” Tony sings. 

Steve tries not to roll his eyes. 

\----

“It’s a pretty straightforward job,” Steve says, running a hand through his hair.  On the other end of the phone, Clint makes an annoyed sound most often heard in small dogs. 

“ _It’s inception, dumbass._   _Straightforward doesn’t even come into the picture._ ”

“Come on, how hard can it be?  We’ve done it before.  It’s not even that complex of an idea.  We’ll only need two layers.  Cobb’s team did it with three.”

“ _Don’t talk to me about Cobb’s team.  We’re not Cobb’s team.  Cobb’s team is a mess of psychological issues and overblown theatrics.  We’re elegant.  We’re concise.  We’re fucking_ better _than they are._ ”

“So you’re in?” 

Clint sighs heavily.  “ _Yeah, yeah, I’m in.  Meet you in two days._ ”

The phone clicks off before Steve can say goodbye, but, well, he wasn’t expecting anything different. 

 _Two down,_ he thinks, looking over Tony’s pile of cardboard and plaster.  _Two to go._

\----

It works something like this: Steve is the extractor, Tony’s the architect, Clint runs point, Natasha’s the forger, and Bruce makes chemical compounds so potent he could put a Columbian drug dealer out of business in about three hours. 

They don’t work together all the time.  It just isn’t _safe,_ not in their world, and besides jobs that need a whole team are few and far between. 

But they keep in touch, and trade clients, and generally make so much money it doesn’t even matter that they can’t dream anymore and Steve can’t walk into a room without first making sure no one’s there to kill him. 

It’s good.  Not the life Steve imagined for himself, way back when, but that was then.  That was Bucky and the army and boots that weren’t filled with sand, and this is now. 

If Tony were here, he’d tell Steve to stop living in the past.  To let go and move on, _viva la vida,_ because Tony is an asshole and out of control and so much smarter than Steve it’s ridiculous.

Clint shares Tony’s philosophy.  He doesn’t let anything hold him down unless it’s Coulson and Tasha, and even that’s touch and go, depending on their mood. 

“You’re an idiot,” Clint had laughed.  He meant it in the most affectionate way possible, but he said it _all the time._ Steve isn’t a genius but he’s not stupid.  He’s perfectly aware that he has issues, thank you very much _Barton,_ but he’s working on them.

They’re all working on them.

Natasha might agree with Tony, but she also might agree with Steve, might think that the past defines you, and you can’t let go of it ever or you’ll lose who you are.

It’s hard to tell, with Tasha. 

Steve had asked Bruce once, a few months after Berlin.  Out of all of them, Steve thinks that Bruce is the one who _gets it_ the most, who understands all of them and their stupid problems better than they ever will. 

“I think,” Bruce had said slowly, not looking up from his work, “that maybe you should take a break, Steve.  You’ve got a house in New York, right?  Go over there, take a few months off.  You’ll be okay.”

_You’ll be okay._

Steve doesn’t know why people kept saying that to him. 

He’s perfectly fine.  No, really.  He did like Bruce said and spent a month and a half with Coulson in New York, and by the end he was ready to kill someone out of sheer boredom and Phil threw him out because he was tired of buying new gym equipment. 

Work is the best thing for Steve.  It’s the best for all of them, really it is.  All that psychologist bullshit about needing your own space, time to sort it all out, is wrong.  What Steve needs is to be _busy._ Doing something, always moving around, keeping his hands and his brain occupied so that the flickers at the edges of his vision don’t become full-blown nightmares, _that_ works. 

 _Viva la vida,_ Tony always said. 

“What do you mean by that?” Steve asks, looking up from his notebook.  (He’s frantically trying to find a number for Natasha that a) gets her on the line and b) doesn’t trigger the security protocols of five different government agencies.  So far, no luck.) 

“Mm?”  Tony is elbow-deep in cardboard and plaster and wires, his hair sticking up like it does when the closest thing he’s gotten to sleep is twenty minutes face-down in the coffee pot.  Glue splatters across his nose. 

“ _Viva la vida._ What do you mean, when you say that?” 

Tony blinks, then laughs.  It’s edged with exhaustion and maybe a little hysteria.  “Oh baby,” he says.  “You know what I mean.”

Steve looks back down at the hastily-scrawled numbers.  “Yeah,” he mutters.  “I guess I do.”

\----

Phil Coulson is not human. 

Anyone who’s spent more than a week around him figures this out.  He’s just really, really _not_.  For one, Steve has never seen anyone, not even Tony, drink that much coffee at once and be okay.  For two, he’s so terrifyingly efficient that he simultaneously does Secret Government Things (Tony’s words), runs a coffee shop in New York, and takes care of-slash-bullies Clint into something resembling a functional human being. 

And for three, he knows _everything._

Seriously.  Everything.

Coulson shows up at the warehouse two days after Steve calls Clint, a bag at his feet and several steaming cups of coffee tucked under an arm.

“Move, please,” he says. 

Steve, because he knows better by now, doesn’t argue and lets Coulson in. 

Clint drops his head on the table.  “Damn it,” he mutters. 

“You tell him?”

“Nope.”

“You should know better than to try and hide things from me,” Coulson says, setting his coffee down.  “I know everything.” 

Clint sighs loudly, and Coulson smacks Bruce’s hand when he tries to sneak one of the coffee cups.

“Mine,” he says sternly.

“All of it?”

“Leave it, Bruce,” Steve mutters.  “There’s still some in the pot.”  Tony hasn’t been out yet this morning—the door to his workshop is still firmly closed—so it’s one of the rare occasions where there actually is enough caffeine for everybody and Steve is _not_ letting that go to waste. 

“Your plans are shit,” Coulson says, and sweeps them off the table. 

“Those are _my_ plans,” Clint growls.

“And they’re shit.”

“Well,” Clint says defensively.  “I just started!  I still have to research the fuck out of this guy, what did you expect, Budapest?” 

“Budapest was shit too.” 

“Budapest was a fucking work of art.” 

“I nearly died in Budapest.”

“Baby.”

Steve tunes them out, as per usual.  Clint and Coulson are _weird_ when they’re in the same room together.  Natasha’s the only one who can really understand or tolerate them—they are, as Tony says, _ménage à trois_ , and Steve _really doesn’t want to know_ what that means—and she’s not here right now, so for the sake of his safety, Steve slips away and leaves them to it.

Tony’s workshop, when he gets there, is a mess, but that’s the usual.

Tony is nowhere to be found.  He’s been working, though.  Half a dozen models litter the table, cities yawning and curving in on themselves, buildings like bare bones tucking inward. 

Steve runs his fingers through sawdust, and it feels like sand. 

He doesn’t like sand, all that much. 

“Ah ah ah,” Tony sings, leaning against the doorway.  Steve jumps and pulls his hands away guiltily.  Tony has this _thing_ about people, even Steve, touching his work before it’s done.  The only person he’s ever let do that was Pepper.  “No touching.”

“Sorry,” says Steve.

Tony rolls his eyes.  There’s sawdust in his hair and dried glue caked to his fingers, smeared on his Black Sabbath tee.  “Uh huh.  What brings you up here, fearless leader?  Got bored playing with the big boys?”

“Coulson’s here.”

“And you ran scared?”

“Shut up,” Steve mutters, and Tony cackles, wandering over to him.  He smells like Berlin. 

“Tasha here yet?”

“No.  I can’t get ahold of her without the CIA threatening to hunt me down.  I don’t want the CIA to hunt me down, Tony.  Nick Fury scares me.”

“Nick Fury scares us all,” Tony says reassuringly, slapping Steve’s shoulder.  “As much as I love your company, honey, get out.  Work to be done, and all that.  You know how it is.  Go mope somewhere else.”

“I don’t _mope,_ ” Steve laughs, letting himself be ushered out the door.  “ _You’re_ the one shut up in a dark room all day long.”

“The daylight, it _burns,_ ” Tony deadpans, and shuts the door in Steve’s face.

Steve grins, and then it fades a little, the harsh note of Berlin still hanging around him.  He palms his totem.  It’s a solid, comforting weight. 

Downstairs, Clint and Coulson are still arguing and Bruce has vacated the area, muttering about ridiculous government agents and brain bleach. 

 _Might as well call Tasha again,_ Steve thinks, and follows Bruce upstairs. 

\----

In the end, it’s Bruce who gets Natasha.  He disappears for two days to go see a chemist friend and comes back covered in dust, his hair a wild mess and a new bruise blooming brilliantly across his cheek, with Natasha in tow.

“Mombasa,” is all he says.

“Ah,” says Steve, understanding.  He grins at Natasha.  “Good to see you, Tash.  Nick Fury says hi.”

She laughs.  “You tried to call me?”

“Several times.  I’m on his most-wanted list now because of you, did you know?”

“Sorry about that," she says, not sounding sorry at all. "Fury's always been a little possessive."

"You can say that again," Clint mutters, prowling in with a stack of files and Coulson trailing behind him, tapping on his Blackberry.

"Oh, a big job," Natasha says, a sharp smile creeping onto her face. "Excellent. I was getting _bored._ "

"It's inception," Steve explains.

She raises a single eyebrow. "Again?"

Steve shrugs.

"Okay then. Mark?"

"His name is Loki Odinsson," Clint says. "Hey, sweetheart. The hell did Bruce find you?"

"Mombasa," Bruce calls, from where he's currently sprawled face-down on a dusty couch.

"Ah." Clint looks Natasha up and down critically, his eyes sparking. "Worse places to hide, I guess."  
Natasha grins.

"So," Steve says, ushering them all to a rickety table. He leaves Bruce where he is. Mombasa doesn't agree with him. "Now that we're all here, let's get started."

"Thor Odinsson hired us to preform inception on his brother, Loki," Clint says, handing them each a file. "Loki is the second son of Odin Borrsson, also known as—"

"The Wanderer," Natasha murmurs. Clint and Coulson both seem to understand, but Steve wrinkles his nose in confusion. Bruce makes a questioning sound from the couch. "The Wanderer's the biggest European crime lord outside of Russia," she explains. "Or at least he was. Last I heard he's retired and encouraging his sons to go legit."

"Thor Odinsson seems to be taking this advice to heart. He's not exactly a model businessman but in the last few years he's mostly reinvented the family business through sheer stubbornness and enthusiasm alone. Asgardian Enterprises is one of the biggest names in the R&D field right now," Coulson adds.

Clint glares at all of them for stealing his thunder. As point it's his job to research and he takes it Very Seriously.

"Sorry," says Coulson. Natasha just smiles.                                                                  

 _"Anyway_ ," Clint continues, "Thor's doing pretty well, but his baby brother isn't.  Loki Odinsson, twenty-four.”  He pushes a picture across the table and Steve picks it up, curious.

Odin’s youngest son is skinny, pale, and dark-haired, with flashing, clever eyes and long-fingered hands.  Steve almost wouldn’t believe that he’s related to Thor if it weren’t for the sheer determination—Thor’s determination—in the set of his mouth. 

“Kid doesn’t look like much, I know,” says Clint, “but he’s a dangerous little shit.  While Thor’s been working his father’s business into something pretty respectable, Loki’s been dragging things the other way.  Odin had a lot of contacts off the books, and it looks like his kid has found them.”

“Contacts like…?”

“Arms dealers, drug kingpins, low-level terrorists.  You name it, Loki’s got his fingers in all the pies.”

“So what did Thor want us to do to him?” Natasha asked, frowning.  “The son of a crime lord will have a militarized subconscious at the very least.”

“And he’s unstable,” Clint adds.  “Prelims say that he’s unbalanced on his good days.”

“And on his bad days?”  Steve asks.

“Remember that one time we thought it’d be funny to mess with Bruce’s chemicals and fed that one dog concentrated gamma by accident?”

Steve winces.  “Yeah.”  (He still has the scars, actually.) 

“Like that.”

“That,” he says, rubbing his forehead, “is not good.”

“No shit,” says Natasha but _she_ sounds excited.  “We could use a challenge.”

“Are you up to it?”  Coulson says, abruptly leaning forward.  He’s looking directly at Steve in a way that makes his shoulders feel too tight, skin stretched to a breaking point. 

“Yes,” Steve mutters.  “I’m fine.” 

“What does Thor want us to plant?” Bruce says, looking between Coulson and Phil uneasily. 

Steve starts, jerks his head up.  “He wants us to stop Loki from taking up their father’s business, I think.”

Coulson blinks.  “Alright then.  When d’you think the models will be done?”

Steve looks upstairs.  Tony’s workshop is still closed, sawdust leaking from underneath the door.  “I dunno,” Steve says.  “A few days, probably.  Once we get more information, they can be refined for Loki specifically.”

“Great,” Clint hums.  “You said what, two levels?”

“It should be enough.”

“Okay, two levels.  Nat and I will try and get close to Loki.  Bruce, we’ll get you medical records so you can detail some compounds.  Phil, you got Odin?”

“Sure.”

“We’ll get Thor,” Steve says, referring to himself and Tony.  “I have a few more questions about what he wants, exactly.”

“Okay!” Clint claps his hands together, rubbing them.  He grins, wide and familiar.  It’s _good_ to be working together again.  It feels right, and it’s been too long. 

“Hey,” says Bruce softly, drawing Steve’s attention away from the others.  “You sure you’re alright?”

“ _Yes,_ ” Steve snaps, standing and fighting the urge to hit something.  “I’m _fine._ Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

The chemist holds up his hands, smiling crookedly.  “Just lookin’ out for you, big guy.  We worry.”

“Worry,” Steve mutters, grabbing his file and stalking up the stairs.  “I’m _fine._ ” 

He can almost make himself believe it, too.

\----

Phil Coulson has an encrypted laptop.  Steve’s only seen it once or twice—Coulson hides it—and he’s never seen what’s on it, but he’s a pretty smart guy and he can guess.

Coulson makes lists.  Long ones, short ones, all kinds of lists, and he keeps them scribbled down on napkins or coffee holders or his encrypted laptop.

And Steve’s pretty sure Coulson has lists about them, the team, and what their problems are, because Coulson is hyper-organized and, well, they’ve all got issues.

Tony’s file, if it exists, would list his alcoholism, his risk-taking, his complete disregard for rules, authority, and conventional living. 

Natasha’s would list her trust issues, her PTSD, and her penchant for making anyone who crosses her disappear. 

Clint’s would also mention PTSD, and control issues, and the inability to stay in one place for long. 

Bruce’s would have only pictures.  Since they would be pictures of mutated dogs, acidicly melted tables, and that one hotel bar, they would be enough.

Steve’s list, if he has one, would have his service record.  Bucky’s death certificate.  A PTSD diagnosis, a few mugshots, and a video.

This video, if there is indeed footage, would be from a small warehouse on the edges of Berlin.  It would be timestamped _2:32 AM, 05/04/11,_ and it would last maybe five or six minutes.

There would be five people in that warehouse, asleep on old lawn chairs.  They would be hooked up to a slightly-glowing machine. 

At 2:33, other men would swarm the building.  They would wear black, faces covered by ski masks, and they would quickly and efficiently shoot three of the five people.  One of the victims, a woman, would wake up for a split second. 

Then she would die. 

The masked men would take away the machine, and then, at 2:35 AM, while the other two still slept, a bomb would go off, and the ceiling would collapse.

The tape would abruptly go dark.

This video may or may not exist.  Steve doesn’t know for sure.  His memories of that night are warped and faded, less like memory and more like watching an old home video with the quality all fuzzy, detached but strangely present.  All he knows for sure is that he made it out, that he crouched on the side of a German road with Tony and held them together and _prayed_ for all he was worth for a miracle. 

This video may or may not exist, and it may or may not be in Coulson’s possession.

This video may or may not be of Berlin, and the last time Steve tried to preform inception.

And this video may or not be Steve Rogers’s worst nightmare.

\----

For the record, Steve’s pretty sure his last words are going to be “I can handle it.”  _It,_ in this case, happens to be half a keg of vodka he’s pretty sure Natasha brewed in her bathtub, and it’s the best fucking stuff on earth.  He can handle another glass.

Tony, who’s spilled in beside Steve, tucked close and warm against his chest, cackles.

It’s all his fault anyway. 

He’d taken one look at Steve after the meeting, declared, “That’s it, we’re getting you _hammered,_ ” and promptly led the way to their hotel.

(They’ve booked out the whole top floor, and it’s less a collection of neat, ordered, _divided_ rooms and more like _our huge communal room_ that just happens to have some very poorly placed walls.  Within the month, most of those will be gone.)

Natasha doesn’t have a distillery in her bathtub _yet,_ but she’s only been here long enough to drop off her bags and then follow Bruce to the warehouse, and she does have a couple of cases of vodka—always, she’s a firm believer in the get-them-drunk-and-steal-their-secrets method—so Steve is now very drunk, Tony’s even drunker, and Natasha is going to kill them.  With her thighs.

“She has very nice thighs,” Steve says, a little helplessly.

Tony makes a vague gesture that might be a soothing pat.  “I know, big guy.  I know.”

Steve groans, thumping his head back against the bathtub. 

“Meeting went badly, yeah?”  (Tony is an expert on team meetings—well, life in general—going badly.)

“No,” Steve says, because it’s true.  It’s great to see everyone again, to be working and laughing with them after all this time.  He’s missed them, these last few months.  It’s just, well.  “I’m tired of them asking if I’m okay.”

“Ah.”  Tony gets it.  “Berlin?”

“Berlin.”

Tony takes another drink, his eyes dark and unfocused.  “You’re alright, you know.” 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Tony says, fiercely.  “You’re just fine, Steve.”

Steve cracks a grin.  “Thanks, Tony.  But I can’t exactly take your word on mental health issues, you know.” 

Tony doesn’t ask why.  He just laughs.  “Yeah,” he says, “I know.” 

\----

Thor Odinsson is delighted to meet with Steve and Tony again.  “My friend!” he booms, striding across the tarmac— _private_ tarmac, Tony said, approvingly—to grab hold of Steve’s hand and crush it happily.  “You have come with questions, yes?”

“Uh, yes, Mr. Odinsson,” Steve says.

“Please, call me Thor, friend,” the blonde giant laughs.  “Mr. Odinsson is much too formal.”

“Thor, then.”

“I like him,” Tony says, matching Thor’s broad grin. 

“And how are you on this fine day?”

 _Fine_ is an interesting word for it.  They’re in Switzerland—Steve currently can’t be in the States, thank you Nicky Fury—and it’s beautiful outside, but it’s fucking _cold._

“Fine,” Steve says instead.  He wants Thor to think he’s friendly, that he’s on Thor’s side.

Steve isn’t. 

The second rule of dreamshare (the first being _don’t fuck up)_ is _no one’s on your side but you.  Don’t forget it._ In their business, clients have as many ulterior motives as they themselves to, and good thieves _always_ look into, manipulate, and occasionally steal from the client, maybe even more so than they do for a mark. 

Somehow, Steve doesn’t think that the son of a notorious crime lord will appreciate that too much. 

“Come,” Thor says jovially, speaking at a somewhat-normal level now.  “Are you hungry?”

“I could eat,” Steve says.  Tony _hmms_ in agreement.    

Thor leads them over to a neat little table already loaded with food, and together they sit under the cold sun. 

“So,” Steve mutters, taking out his notepad and a pen.  “What can you tell me about your brother?” 

Thor carefully wipes his mouth.  The smile on his face slackens, for a moment, and then returns brighter than ever. 

“Loki is smart,” he says proudly.  “Far smarter than I, to be honest.”

“Is that why he took over your father’s business?”

Thor’s expression blackens.  “My brother has always been clever, you see.  Some might say too clever.  He was always playing tricks as a child, always trying to prove that he was the smartest, the brightest.  And he was,” Thor adds hastily, noticing Steve’s thoughtful look.  “But he gets bored.  Since our father retired, I have tried to keep Loki on the right side of the law, where our father wanted us.  He did well, but he is, as I said, bored.”

Steve nods.  “I know someone like that.” 

Thor smiles again.  “My brother is not a bad man,” he says.  “He is a good person, who has made some bad decisions.  I want you and your team to help him, Mr. Rogers.” 

Somehow, the use of his last name is threatening.  Tony’s eyes darken behind his sunglasses. 

“We’ll do everything we can,” Steve promises, and they will.  They’ve never botched a job, together at least.  They’re the best. 

“I’m sure you will,” Thor says amiably, taking a drink.  “But, you see, this is my baby brother.  No one knows him better than I do, and I can’t trust just anyone to wander around in his mind.”

“Mr. Odinsson, we’re the best.  We have a perfect track record, and we’ve done inception before.  There’s no one better,” Steve says soothingly. 

“I’m sure.  But I do not have to worry!  My advisors—” and doesn’t _that_ sound just sketchy— “have presented me with a plan.”

Steve leans forward.  He has a gun within reach, and a knife in his belt, just in case.  “And that would be?”

Thor beams.  “I will join your team!” 

\----

“Just so you know, this is a really bad idea,” Natasha mutters, giving Thor a sidelong glance.

Steve shrugs helplessly.  “What did you want me to do, tell him no?”

“That would’ve been nice,” Clint chimes in.  “We don’t need  _tourists_.”

“He’ll be fine,” Steve says.  “He said he’s had dream training before, and he’s the son of a mob boss.  I’m sure he can handle himself.  Besides, won’t it help to have a familiar face when we go into Loki’s head?”

The point and the forger give him identical flat looks. 

“Someone for the projections to focus on, at least,” Steve points out. 

“Eh,” Clint says.  “Whatever.  If he gets hurt or drops into limbo, though, I’m not going in after him.”  

Steve blinks, startled.  “Is that a possibility?  Dropping into limbo, I mean?”

“We don’t know yet,” says Bruce.  “While you were gone we started to do some research, and we might need to go a little deeper than two levels.”

“How much deeper?”

“Another level, probably.  Maybe two.”

“ _Four levels?_ ” That’s insane.  Steve’s only done three twice, and the second time didn’t go so well.  He has  _no inclination whatsoever_ of going down three again, let alone deeper than that.  “What the hell do we need four levels for?”

“Have you met this guy?” Clint says. 

“No.”

“Well while you were off recruiting the jolly blonde giant over there, Nat and I spent two days shadowing this kid.”

“And?”

“He’s fucked up,” Clint says.  “By our standards, even.”

“His brain is like a box of cats,” Bruce grumbles.  “I could smell the crazy from three blocks away.”

“So, what, we’re going four levels down?”

“If you still wanna do the job, yeah.”

“Is that even possible?”  Steve drags a hand through his hair.  He feels like everything is spinning out of control.  First Coulson shows up, then Thor jumps on board, and now they’re going to need three levels to get the fucking job done. 

Everyone looks at Bruce.  “Theoretically,” he says.  “We can do three, easy, we’d just have to bring Loki here.  My friend in Mombasa hooked me up with some new compounds, and I can have them tailored up within the month.”

“What about four?”

The chemist shrugs.  “I’ve heard rumors that it’s been done.  I can make a sedative strong enough, easy.  The only problem would be the somnacin, and keeping the dream stable.”

“ _Je_ sus,” Steve mutters. 

“You wanna call it quits?” Clint asks. 

He chews his lip.  “I don’t see how we can.  We’ve got Thor here already, and he’s financing the whole thing.  We made the commitment.”

“We could always back out,” Bruce says, and the other three almost smile. 

“Back out of a job commissioned by the boss of one of the fastest-growing enterprises in the world, he says,” Steve mutters. 

“Commissioned by the son of a mob boss, he says,” Natasha laughs.

“Whose arms are the size of truck tires, he says.”  Clint shakes his head. 

“Alright, alright, I get it,” Bruce says, throwing up his hands.  “If we back out we’ll be blacklisted.”

“At the very best,” Natasha corrects. 

“At worst?”

She gives Bruce an even, blank stare.  “He’ll do what I’d do.”

“Ah,” the chemist says tactfully.

"We’re screwed,” Clint hums.  He doesn’t seem all that concerned about it.  “Might as well go with it.”

“Damn it.”  Steve doesn’t look forward to telling Tony.  Two models are hard enough, but  _four_?

“You’ll be alright, yeah?”  Clint asks.  His face is unreadable.  “The last time you did three levels was—”

“I’ll be fine,” Steve says, plastering a grin on his face.  “I’m just a little out of practice, is all.  Hey, Bruce?”

“Mm?”

“Will you hook up a PASIV for me?  I’ll be down in a minute.”

“Sure,” says Bruce, watching Steve make his way through the mess of cardboard boxes and folding chairs.  "Where are you going?"

"Just upstairs.  I have to somehow get two more levels out of Tony."  

Clint opens his mouth, a question on his face, but Natasha shakes her head minutely.  He closes his mouth. 

"Good luck," she says.

Steve gives her an odd glance, and shrugs.  He has better things to do that puzzle out the mystery that is Natasha Romanoff. 

Such as bully an architect into building two more mazes. 

Joy.

\----

His dreams are invariably of the desert. 

Afghanistan left its mark on Steve whether he wanted it to or not, and he can’t shake it off no matter how much older he gets. 

He learns not to mind too much, after a while.  Even a desert has a sort of strange beauty about it, once you sit down and _look_ for it.  After all this time Steve even finds the red red sun comforting, almost, and the cacti are pretty in bloom.  He used to sketch the desert for hours, trying to capture every little sun-soaked detail and trap it on paper.  The only thing Steve doesn’t like about the desert is the sand.

He really, really _hates_ sand. 

It’s messy and rough and it gets everywhere, and makes it damn near impossible to get a grip on, which sucks if you’re trying to run away from insurgents with guns and bombs that burn sand to glass. 

 _No,_ Steve thinks irritably.  _Bad Steve.  Think about something else._

The desert is lonely, this time.  Sometimes Steve dreams people into it, projections stretching like sand for miles and miles, but this time it’s just him and the cacti and the sun, sinking lower and lower into the sand. 

Steve’s drawing.  His dreams of being an artist kind of fizzled and died years ago, before the war even, but drawing is something he’s never—and will never—give up.  Barton teased him about it, years ago, back when they were new and still learning each other’s neuroses, said that now they were in dreamshare he’d never have to hawk a painting that took him seventy hours of grief and mental anxiety for ten bucks again. 

Steve had casually pointed out that a bow and some arrows weren’t much use against men with guns.  They had then fought like bull-headed soldiers in the middle of warehouse, and never brought it up again. 

Drawing for Steve is just… Relief.  Drawing is clean.  Simple.  It’s easier to get his brain and hands to work together than it is his brain and mouth, and when he draws he doesn’t have to think, he just has to feel. 

It’s like dreaming that way.

“Man,” Tony says, kicking up sand as he shambles over to Steve’s side and flops down next to him.  “You really need to let this go, you know.  These are some serious issues bundled up in here, I can just _tell._ ”

“I’ve been in your dreams,” Steve shoots back.  “You want to talk about _my_ issues?”

“Okay, that one thing with the giant alien was totally not my fault.  You’re the one who had that H.P. Lovecraft movie marathon on all day.  It’s actually amazing that my brain didn’t try and impregnate you with alien babies or something.”

“That’s _Alien,_ Tony,” Steve says patiently.  “And do you realize how awkward that sounds?”  

“Yes,” Tony says unrepentantly, flashing him a grin.  The sun reflects off his sunglasses, and sand doesn’t seem to stick to his suit. 

“What are you doing here, Tony?  I told Bruce I wanted to dream alone for a little while.”

“Bah.” Tony waves his hand dismissively.  Steve has to duck to avoid being smacked in the eye.  “Bruce can’t keep me out, you know that.  _No one_ can keep me out.”

“Again, awkward.  And I bet Natasha could.”

“She’s not even human.  She doesn’t count.”

Steve grins.  “You’re still mad over the whole Tokyo incident, aren’t you.”

“No!  I am a very gracious and forgiving person, even if she _did_ get me on Proculus Global’s shit list for the next three decades.”

“You’ve always been on Proculus’s shit list,” Steve laughs.  “You think Saito was ever going to let you near his R&D department?  You’d make all of them cry.”

Tony shows all of his teeth.  “You know it, honey bun.”

“ _Honey bun,_ ” Steve mutters scathingly, shaking his head.  He pointedly focuses on his drawing.  So far it’s less of a desert landscape and more of a few abstract catci and grains of sand, but whatever, he’s making a point.

Tony lets him sulk for a little while, basking in the desert heat.  (Tony is a firm believer that anything below fifty degrees is a sin against nature, and should be wiped from the face of the earth.)  He can’t sit quietly for longer than five minutes, though, and breaks the silence right on time.  “You don’t look so good, you know,” he says softly.

Steve’s fingers tighten around his pencil.  “I. Am. Fine.”

“Sure you are,” Tony says, tapping the side of his nose knowingly.  “You look just fine to me, fearless leader.  Begs the question, though, what are you doing dreaming of deserts when you could be sleeping?  You’re all jet-laggy and shit.  It’s important to get a good night’s sleep, you know, otherwise you won’t grow up to be a big strong boy.”

“ _Tony,_ ” Steve snaps, and stops himself.  The desert-dream wavers, turning Berlin-cold in a flash, the sun plunging away and the sand collapsing to dirt and a rough, cracked road. 

“Steve,” Tony says.  He smiles.  His lips are flecked with blood.  The stink of Berlin is all around them and Steve _remembers,_ for a moment, in a blinding flash-bang of noise and color and screaming, waking up to find Pepper dead and Peggy dead and Erkstine dead, and Tony with a hole in his chest, pressing his fingers to the wounds with wide, wondering eyes. 

He’s always known.  He pretends he doesn’t remember, sometimes, pretends that it’s okay to talk to Tony in the workroom and sit next to him in the sunshine when it’s not, of course it isn’t, but Steve has to cope somehow. 

“What are you doing here,” Steve says heavily.  He turns away.  He can’t look. 

Tony laughs softly.  “You sound surprised.  What, tired of seeing me topside already?”

“I don’t particularly enjoy the looks I’m getting, no.”

“It’s not Clint’s fault.  You know how he is.  He just wants to help.  Thinks you need a stiff drink and you’ll be good to go.”

Steve barks a laugh.  The air tastes like Berlin tasted, blood and ash and somnacin pressing down on his tongue, and he remembers and burns with it.  “Good ol’ Clint,” he says. 

Tony _hmms_ an agreement.  “You’re not taking your medicine, are you?”

Steve shrugs.  “Didn’t see the point.  I’m alright physically, and what’s wrong with my head—” _you_ goes unspoken— “the meds won’t fix.”

“Meds never fix anything,” Tony says agreeably.  He feels real, warm and solid and alive at Steve’s side.  Steve grips his totem so hard it hurts like help come too late, like blood drying tacking and gritty on his fingers, like a howl breaking in his chest and dying there, sitting in shocked silence as Phil Coulson cleans the blood from his face, tells him gently that he did everything he could, he tried, it wasn't his fault. (It was.)

“Why are you here, Tony?”  he asks again.  “Why can’t you just—” His throat closes.  It’s hard to swallow, this.  “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“You know I can’t,” Tony says.  He still doesn’t sound sorry.  “ _You’re_ the one with the messed-up brain, big guy.  Why can’t you stop seeing me?  You really miss me that much?”

“You know I do,” Steve says before he can stop himself. 

Tony laughs.  “Sentimental bastard,” he says fondly.

Steve cracks a watery grin.  “That’s me,” he tells Tony, leaning against him on a German roadside.  Darkness bears down from all sides, but Tony is warm.  Is solid.  Is very nearly real, it a way that slices Steve to the bone.

“It wouldn’t even be that different, I bet, if you stayed down here,” Tony says thoughtfully.  He leans against Steve, familiarity in every line of his body.  “Hell, you don’t even need to stay dreaming.  Your reality is fucked, my friend.” 

“Tony,” Steve says, very, very calmly.  His hands hurt, and his bones protest as he shoves up and away, stumbling to the other side of the road.  Tony stays where he was, blood dripping down his chin now, wet-dark in the thin light. “Tony.”

“Steve.”

Somewhere in the blackened sky, music floats down, old worn-out Dean Martin because Steve’s always loved the classics. 

Tony’s lips quirk up. 

The kick’s coming.

“Tony,” Steve says raggedly, “why can’t you just _leave_?”

“Oh baby,” says the shade, smiling wide and bright, out of place here in dark Berlin with Dean Martin falling down around them, “I’m here to stay.” 


	2. ii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part the second! Thank you so much for all the support! You guys are fantastic! 
> 
> Special thanks to Leah for her crazy-awesome skills in editing, plot control, et cetera <3
> 
> The title is taken from Pablo Neruda's poem "Love," which is beautiful and gorgeous and omg.
> 
> Disclaimer: Don't own Inception or the Avengers.

shooting stars, falling objects

 

“He’s hiding something,” Natasha says, looking up at the closed workshop door.  

Clint doesn’t look up from his reports.  “Yup,” he mutters, squinting to read a line of skinny type.  “I know.”

She raises an eyebrow.  “And you’re completely okay with it?”

“Sure, why not?  We’ve all got issues. His are just newer, is all.”

Natasha shakes her head, thoughtful.  “He’s always had issues.  You’ve seen his projections.  Remember what they did to Schmidt?”

Clint grins, a blissful glaze sweeping over his eyes.  “That was awesome.  Too bad that kind of thing can’t happen in real life.  It’d be the greatest horror movie ever.” 

(Schmidt was the first and only person to try and steal secrets from Steve.  Steve’s subconscious did not approve. 

It’s been years and Natasha doesn’t really keep tabs on Schmidt, but she hears he still can’t have a conversation without breaking down into hysterical babbling.) 

“My point,” she says firmly, dragging Clint’s attention back down, “is that his mind is dangerous.  All of ours are, and we can’t be keeping secrets from each other.”

He barks a laugh, looking up.  “Like you’ve told us all your secrets.”

“I have,” she says, perhaps a little too quickly because Clint’s mouth curves in a knowing smile.

“What were you doing in Mombasa, then?”

She opens her mouth, and then closes it again.

“Thought so.”

“That’s different,” she says.  “What I’m doing in Mombasa isn’t going to endanger any of you.  If Steve’s compromised—”

“He’s fine,” Clint soothes, refocusing on his research.  “If he’s compromised, he’ll tell us.”

“What if he has a shade?”  

The point man looks up again, his face flat and serious.  “Then he has a shade.  We’ll deal with it.  Besides, if he’s got a shade it’ll just be Tony.  Tony loves us.”

“I know _Tony_ loves us, but what about Steve’s subconscious?  We’ve known him for years, and his mind is used to us, but still.  Even your projections go after me, if we wait long enough.”

“Steve’s mind has never outright attacked us before,” Clint says reasonably.  “Yeah, there was that one time we dreamed up Brazil but he spent three weeks apologizing, remember?  As if our heads haven’t torn him apart a dozen times.” 

Natasha makes a short, contemplative sound, her eyes never leaving the closed door.  “Shades are dangerous,” she murmurs.  “They’re not normal projections, you know that.”

Clint’s lips twitch up in a sharp, curving grin.  “I do.”

“So what are we going to do?  Outright confront him?”  Somehow the thought of arguing with _Steve,_ who she’s known for five years, seven months, and sixteen days, who still calls her “ma’am” if she catches him by surprise, who politely looks away when she changes in front of him (he even blushes, which is a nice change from Clint and his Lecher Face), seems _wrong._

Natasha Romanoff has done many, many wrong things in her life.  She doesn’t want this to be one of them. 

“We wait,” Clint says.  “Until we start doing dry runs.  We’ll have him be the dreamer and we’ll see if Tony shows up.”

“If he does?”

“What changes, if he does?  Steve won’t risk our safety with his subconscious, you know he won’t.  If Tony—if he even dreams Tony—is there, he’s not going to hurt us.  Steve won’t let him.”

Clint is (as much as it pains her to admit) right.  If there’s one thing Steve cares about, above anything else, it’s making sure his teammates—his _friends—_ are safe. He won’t risk the few he has left, not for anything. 

She relaxes.  “We’ll check during the dry runs,” she confirms. 

“I won’t leave him, you know,” Clint says carefully, casually.  He still doesn’t look up. 

“Barton,” she says.  She’s not all that surprised, not really.

When Clint looks up it’s Budapest, it’s St. Petersburg, it’s all the places he should have left her but didn’t because he’s Clint, because he’s fearless, because he’s ridiculous, because he’s attached.

“I won’t,” he says fiercely.  “Steve’s one of us.  Tony was too.  I won’t just leave him to take the fall if the job goes bad.”

Natasha sighs, meeting his eyes across the table.  She wonders, not for the first time, how deep Clint’s loyalty goes, if it’s as deep as her mistrust is, or Steve’s sense of duty is, or Tony’s wild creativity was.  “Okay,” she promises.  “We won’t leave him.  We’ll stay.”

She doesn’t say, _and get ripped apart by a shade._ She doesn’t say, _and get ourselves killed because we fucked up this job._ She doesn’t say, _I think this might be it, Barton, better hold on tight._

She smiles and says, “ _Boch_ , I hope you’re right.”

\----

“Okay,” says Steve hours later, wiping a hand over his face.  “Okay, so what’s the plan?”

Clint and Natasha trade glances, and Tasha blinks.  “We’re thinking three levels right now,” she explains.  “With a fourth as back-up, just in case.”

“I’ve got the necessary compounds,” Bruce adds helpfully from the corner, where he’s ensconced with some faintly-smoking test tubes and a humming PASIV.  “They just need a little,” there’s a collective wince at a thunderous bang, and Bruce swears, “uh, tweaking.”

“Can you put together four levels?”  Natasha asks.  “I can help, if you want.”

“No,” Steve says reflexively.  “I’ve got it.  We’ve—sorry, _I’ve_ , got it.  I can handle it.”

“Are you sure?”  Natasha’s eyes are, like the rest of her, hard and uncompromising, but just a little gentle.  She’s offering him an out.

Steve smiles.  “I’m fine,” he assures her.  “If I need help, I’ll ask.  I just need a plan to go off of.  I have some basic models upstairs, and I’ll just tweak them as we add a plan.”

“You don’t have to do extraction and architecture,” Clint points out.  “We’re all competent at it, you don’t have to push yourself—”

“I want to,” Steve says firmly.  “I like building things.  Artist, remember?”

“Steve, yesterday you told me that you ‘had to get to more models out of Tony.’” Natasha’s expression gives nothing away. 

“Force of habit,” Steve tells her easily. 

“Steve,” Clint says, squinting at him, “you know Tony’s—”

“Dead, yeah.”  It comes out of him easily, with only a little pain.  His voice doesn’t even waver.  “Yeah, I know.” 

His chest hurts.  He hides it.

“Just making sure,” Clint mutters.  He, unlike some of the others—even Bruce, sometimes—doesn’t look away.  Clint’s a soldier too.  He’s lost friends before.  “Are you still having nightmares?” 

“Yes,” Steve says, because there’s no point in lying to them, and he wouldn’t anyway.  He trusts them with his mind on a regular basis, has for years now.  They’re not going to turn his secrets against him and besides, they should know. 

“Okay,” says Clint, business-like, and moves on. 

It’s a testament to their trust in him that they even agreed to work with him in the first place.  Unstable dreamers can ruin more jobs than anything else, even militarized projections.  Their dreams have the tendency to fold in and collapse on themselves, or be so vivid it’s almost real, or be more memory and shade than actual dreaming. 

Shades, too, are dangerous. 

 _It’s no wonder reality’s blurring,_ Steve thinks, a little amused and a little bitter.  _It’s just like it was before._

It doesn’t help that he’s hallucinating Tony too, on top of dreaming him.  Steve knows Tony’s dead, he really does—he can’t forget, he has that German road tattooed against his eyelids like a bad horror movie, stuck in his head and he can’t get it out—and he knows that he should probably talk to somebody, but well.

Tony’s not hurting anything, and Steve has always been rooted in the past.  The only problem is, it’s so terrifyingly easy to believe that it’s real.  Steve _wants_ it to be real.  But it isn’t, and he has to remember that. 

“You’ll build the models for us, then?”  Coulson comes trotting in, his encrypted laptop tucked under one arm and a huge tray of coffee balanced on the other. 

“That for all of us?”  Steve asks hopefully.  He hasn’t slept—naturally, anyway—in a few days and he’s starting to feel it. 

Coulson nods.  “Where’d our tourist go?” 

“Back home for a few days,” Steve says, around a mouthful of mocha.  “He’ll be back to start working with us on Monday.”

Coulson _tsks._

“I know,” Clint says, still annoyed.  “A _tourist,_ Jesus.  That’s what, six, seven of us going under, counting The Shining?”

“ _The Shining?_ ” Natasha rolls her eyes.  She’s either exasperated or amused.  Probably a bit of both.  “Really, Barton?  That’s the best you could come up with?”

Clint shrugs.  “Hey, if the shoe fits.  Have you seen this guy?  I was amazed that he didn’t have REDRUM written all over his walls, he’s that creepy.  He’s like a young Hannibal Lecter or something, just _waiting_ to pounce and rip your liver out.”

“Loki Odinsson is a vegetarian, actually,” Coulson says, tapping away on his computer.

“So was Hitler.”

“Point.”

“C’mon, guys, he’s not a genocidal maniac,” Steve says reasonably. 

“You have proof of that?”  Barton shoots back.  “’cause _I_ have proof that points in the other direction.  So far he’s set up a weapons smuggling ring that supplies Hamas, several Somalian insurgents, two warlords in central Asia, and possibly a group of neo-Nazis operating in West Virginia.  That’s not the action of a peaceful person.”

“We can’t go into this thinking he’s evil,” Steve points out.  “If we do, his subconscious will pick us out as hostiles before we can even get close to inception.  We have to go into it with an open mind.”

Clint snorts.

“He’s right, you know,” Natasha says.

“Doesn’t mean Odinsson is a good guy,” Clint mutters.  Arms dealers—particularly ones that supply for insurgents and terrorist groups—are a sore spot for him.  Steve asked, once, but he’s never found out exactly why, just that it involves a small town in Iraq and that PTSD diagnosis on Coulson’s Clint-list. 

“No,” Tasha agrees, “but it means we need to be _very careful._ No Mr. Charles gambits, no risk-taking, none of that.  Loki can’t know we’re dream thieves.  If he does, the whole plan’s out and we’re as good as dead.”

 _This is a mess,_ Steve thought, rubbing his forehead.  Inception was hard enough without the threat of a militarized, potentially sociopathic mind and _tourists,_ not to mention three levels, a shade, and the threat of death hanging over their heads if they failed. 

“Okay,” he says, because he needs to get this out in the open _right now,_ “contingency plans?  What do we do if this thing goes sideways?”

“We’ve thought about that,” Clint says, pulling a separate set of files out from beneath the ones on Loki.  _Thor Odinsson_ is stamped across the top, and the dossier is filled with everything they could find out about their young, laughing client. 

“Bruce will be giving him a little something _extra_ with his somnacin,” Natasha says.  “Just a sedative, nothing to serious,” she adds hastily, at Steve’s scandalized look. “You know, just to keep him under longer.”

“So if this goes bad and we kick out, what?  He’ll be stuck under?”

Natasha nods.  “We’re not going to tell him when we’re planning the kicks, so we can just leave him there if we have to.  If everything goes well, we’ll kick him out with us.  If not, we leave him.”

“You don’t think Loki’s subconscious will kill him?  What if he drops into limbo?”

Natasha Romanoff shrugs delicately.  “Then he drops in limbo.  It’s not our fault.  We’re going to be busy enough watching out for each other, let alone some tourist who decided he could handle it.  He knows the risks.  Odinsson’s his own responsibility.”

Something about that doesn’t sit right with Steve, in a niggling way he can’t explain.  He knows that Tony would never approve, would never leave someone to drift in limbo until their mind turned to soup. 

But, well.  The team comes first.  The team always comes first.  If Steve has to choose between Thor and Natasha, or Clint, or Bruce, he’s choosing them every single time. 

He has enough ghosts running around in his head.  He doesn’t need another.  (Though the thought of shade-Tony and shade-Clint arguing at each other like they used to makes him smile.)

“Okay,” Steve says.  “Then what?  We run?”

“Depends.  If Odinsson’s in limbo, we don’t have to.  Dreamshare is illegal, and he won’t risk his father’s company being linked to it.  No one will come looking for us, not even these advisers he has.  If he’s not in limbo, yeah.  We have to run.”

 _Run_ is a bit of an understatement.  They would basically have to die.  Erase themselves and start over, in different countries with different names, different jobs, maybe even different faces.  They could never talk to each other again for fear of being discovered. 

Steve swallows. That is not an ideal situation. 

“So basically, follow rule one,” he mutters.

Natasha nods sagely.  “Don’t fuck up,” she says, and Clint says, “Amen.” 

Steve thumps his head down on the table.  “This is going to suck, isn’t it?”

“Most likely,” Tasha agrees.  “But hey, it’s a challenge.  If we pull this off, we’ll never have to go hungry again.  Clients will line up for miles.”

“Yeah,” Steve says.  He turns away, looks up at the closed workshop.  “Yeah, that’s a plus, isn’t it?”

\----

“You look like a wreck,” Tony says laughingly, elbow-deep in plaster.  “Jesus, Steve, you need to sit down or something, you look like you’re going to pass out.  You know what happens when you pass out.  You’ll just be in here forever because they won’t hear you and I’m a hallucination, I can’t do shit if you fall over and crack your head open.”

Steve blinks, and sits down.  There’s really no arguing with Tony—well, with his own head—and it’s nice to watch Tony work, levels and levels of dreams-to-be flickering in front of his eyes.

It works something like this:  Tony is Steve’s hallucination.  He’s been dead for a year now and Steve’s been dreaming him for almost that long.  The hallucinations are newer.  Tony-the-shade shows up every now and then on jobs, a ghost at the edges of the room.  Tony-the-hallucination shows up everywhere else, and chatters away while Steve tries to work.

They build models together.  Well, Steve blacks out and builds models, and sometimes likes to imagine that it’s Tony who built them somehow, that he’s alive somewhere in Steve’s head. 

Steve groans, thunking his head back against the wall.  He palms his totem, thinks about taking it out and giving it a spin. 

“Uh oh, you’ve got your Serious Face on,” Tony hums.  He shambles over, circling Steve critically.  “Don’t do that.  You know I hate it when you do that.”

“I’m having blackouts,” Steve tells him. 

Tony rolls his eyes.  “Well duh.  You’re also talking to a hallucination, pumpkin.  Blackouts are to be expected, yeah?”

“Should I tell them?”  Steve asks.  “The team, I mean.”

“You planning on blacking out during the job?”

“No.”  Steve doesn’t black out when he’s working.  It’s only when he’s not that he does, when he’s stuck up in his hotel room, lonely with his own mind that he comes down here and builds and builds like Tony used to.  He laughs.  “It’s no wonder I’m fucked up,” he tells Tony. “I can almost let myself believe that you built these.  I told Natasha that I needed to talk to you, the other day.  She thinks I’m crazy.”

“You are, and I say that with the deepest affection,” Tony says.  “But hey, you’ve got it under control, don’t you?  You know I’m dead.” 

“Yeah,” Steve says, flexing his fingers.  “I know you’re dead.” 

“Well there you go,” Tony laughs.  “Not a problem then, right?  You keep blacking out and I’ll keep building, and we’ll get this done faster than you know it.”

“Only you would encourage mental instability,” Steve says.  He can’t stop a fond smile from fighting its way onto his face.  He can’t help it, not with Tony. 

Tony grins broadly, the glue streaking his hair vivid and real.  He looks _so real,_ but he’s not.  Steve has to keep telling himself that. 

“You know me,” Tony says cheerfully, pecking his cheek.  “Now, you wanna talk shop?  We have _so much work_ to do, you and I aren’t sleeping for days.”

Steve pushes up his sleeves.  “Okay,” he says.  “Let’s get to work.”

\----

He wakes up six hours later curled under the table, sawdust in his hair and glue staining his fingers. 

When he stands up, shivering slightly, he’s alone.

The models, still bare bones, stand like they’ve been moved and manhandled and prodded into position, forced into shapes that don’t seem natural, not yet.

Steve doesn’t remember building them, but he remembers the phantom touch of calloused fingers at his wrist, the smell of Tony (hot metal and soap and coffee) thick in his nose, hair tickling his chin.

Steve curls his fingers into fists, remembers to breathe.

Then, he turns around sharply and walks out, closing the door behind him.

\----

Natasha and Clint are downstairs, speaking low and intimate over coffee.  They nod when they see him.  He nods back, waiting for questions, for accusations, for them to turn around and leave him, too afraid to deal with his issues. 

He tries to find the words to explain his blackouts, prepares a dozen arguments, but they don’t ask. 

And Steve, well.  Steve just doesn’t tell. 

\----

“Are you sure this is safe?” Clint asks, loosening his collar nervously.  “I mean, not that I’m afraid of heights or anything—”

“Good, because that would be a blatant lie,” Steve says.

“—but seriously, this doesn’t look safe at _all._ ” 

“We’re dreaming, Clint,” Natasha says patiently. 

“It still hurts!”

“But you won’t actually _die._ ”

“No,” he mutters, reluctantly climbing the rest of the way up the stairs.  “Just get maimed a little bit, maybe develop a phobia of stairs.”

“Bathmophobia,” Bruce supplies. 

“Awesome.  Something else for Coulson to add to that fucking list of his, bathmo-fucking-phobia—”

“That’s the spirit,” Steve murmurs absently, concentrating intently.  The dream pulls tighter, rippling a little.  “You need to get a bit higher.”

“A little higher, he says!”  Clint climbs on top of the railing despite his grumbling, annoyance written clearly on his face even from this distance.  “You owe me, Rogers!”

“You forgot about Sao Paolo!”  Steve bellows back.  “We’re even!”

“Fuck you!”

Grinning, Steve closes his eyes and imagines it, bringing his intention to the front of his mind.  It swims unsteadily and then stabilizes, sharp and potent.

“Okay!”  Steve shouts.  “Now!”

He _pulls_ on the fabric of the dream exactly as Clint jumps, stretching it like a rubber band, and for a second Clint seems to slow down, hanging suspended between the stairs and the floor.  A wide, deep pool of water blooms from the ground with a faint sucking noise, and Clint splashes down, spluttering.

Steve grins.

“Impressive,” Natasha says, raising an eyebrow.  She paces the length of the pool, ignoring Clint as he bobs to the surface and swims for the edge, muttering under his breath.  “It looks like it’s a part of the square.  How did you get it to blend in so fast?”

Steve beams.  “I didn’t think about it,” he says.  He can’t help but smile proudly.  “Look at the projections.”

Natasha did, and her face split into a wide, frankly wicked grin.  “They didn’t seem to notice a thing,” she laughs.  “Very impressive.”

“The trick to modifying a dream, I think, is to let it create itself.  Say you’re falling and you need something to land on.  Think, _I need something to land on_ and pull.  Don’t try and put a trampoline in the Prado or a pile of pillow cushions in a town square.  Just let it happen, and stuff like this will come out.”

“Let it grow organically, you mean,” Bruce says, inspecting the pool for himself.  It does look like it belongs here, in a hot Spanish plaza.  The stones are the exact color of the minotaur statue in the middle of the square.  The water’s blue and deep, and the bottom is even speckled with coins.  A few projections wander over and sit down on the edges, dangling their feet in.

Steve grins.  “Organic creation,” he says.  “I think that if you just let the dream take over, it’ll give you what you need.  The problems with projections come from meddling in the order of the dream, right?  Folding it in half, bringing up impossible architecture, all of that makes projections antsy because it _doesn’t fit._ But a fountain in a town square?  That fits.”

“You and Tony worked on this, didn’t you?”  Bruce looks up from the water, calculating.  “I remember him saying something about it to me.”

“Yeah, it was his idea,” Steve says.  “He got a grip on it faster than I did.  It works, too.  The projections don’t seem to notice a thing, unless you lose concentration.”

“If you lose concentration?” Clint asks, wiping water from his hair. 

 Steve shrugs.  “Then you’ll get a trampoline, or a pile of pillows.  The hard part is keeping your mind blank.  You can’t think of anything specific or you’ll end up with it.  You have to _want_ something to land on, but you can’t know what you want.”

“Huh,” Clint says, shaking vigorously like an annoyed dog.  Water gets everywhere, and Natasha wipes her face with a glare.  Since it’s her mind they’re dreaming in, every projection turns to stare at Clint, creepily still.                   

“Sounds useful.”  Bruce scratches his chin thoughtfully, his eyes gleaming.  “I bet you could extend this to whole levels.  Planned dreams wouldn’t be necessary, you could just _dream_ , letting it change organically as needed to confuse projections—”

Steve lets him ramble on, pleased with himself.  He’s been working at organic creation for months now, as a kind of personal project.  At first, he was horrible at it.  He just couldn’t _not_ think of landing on a trampoline and so the dream would always fail, and he spent more time getting ripped up by projections that he’d care to remember. 

Now, though, he’s got the hang of it.  It’s just like art, creation at its rawest.  He just has to _imagine,_ and it’s there.  There are no words, no specific patterns and plans and order to it, just intention. 

From high above Dean Martin starts, filtering over the blistering square and deep, clear water. 

_Retorna me…_

“Time to go,” Steve says, grinning at Clint.  “You guys ready?” 

Natasha’s projections sit tamely by the fountain, and the dream simmers, folding in on itself gently. 

“See you topside.”  And Steve’s gone.

He pointedly does not look at the pair of sunglasses sprawled beneath the minotaur statue, gleaming disapprovingly.

\----

The first thing Steve does when he wakes up is go for his totem. 

It’s smooth underneath his fingers, cool, hard, and unyielding.  Real. 

People always give Steve funny looks, when they see him playing with his totem.  An old soldier wearing his dog tags is one thing, but a young man just rubbing a blank pair together is _weird._

Tony bought Steve the tags, two years after they started working together.  Steve lost his original pair in the desert—though he still has the scars from where the blistering metal burned him—and mentioned once, on the rare occasion he was drunk, that he missed them.

Tony, being a creature of spontaneous kindness—if he could even be called _kind_ at any point in his life—showed up at Steve’s apartment the next day with a hangover and a pair of blank tags.

“I didn’t know what to put on ‘em,” he’d said with a broad, loose shrug.  “I personally would go for _Captain Fine,_ but that’s just me.”

Steve, who hadn’t expected the tags at all, just blinked.  “Um,” he said.

“You can just, you know, put on whatever you want.  Name, phone number, serial number—I’d stay away from your social security number, but hey, whatever floats your boat—address, whatever.”  Tony had shrugged again, and somehow Steve thought he was _nervous._ “So, yeah.”

“Thank you,” Steve said, still blinking. 

Tony shifted from foot to foot. “Yeah, okay, I’ll just go now, you look hungover, Pep says jasmine tea’s the best for that.  I wouldn’t know, I hate the damn stuff, the only cure for a hangover is more alcohol, but you seem like a tea kinda guy—”

“Actually,” Steve had said, opening the door a little wider (ow, fuck, _light_ ).  “I just made some coffee.  You want some?”

Tony had hesitated then, Tony who Steve had seen face down a horde of rabid projections, who built dreams so realistic and gritty Steve woke up with sweat on his skin and the taste of the ocean in his mouth, who shot his own business partner in the knee to protect his extraction team. 

He hesitated, and then his face broke into a wide, brilliant grin.

“Coffee,” he’d said.  “I like coffee.”

Steve smiles at the memory, thumbing his tags.  It’s been six years and he still hasn’t put anything on them.  He was going to, once, but, well.  It didn’t exactly work out.

He leaves the sweat and heat of the dream behind, sitting up and pulling the PASIV from his arm.  Coulson, the only one who didn’t go under, is nowhere to be seen, and the other three are starting to stir. 

(Steve had asked Bruce to put just a little less somnacin in his dose, this time.  He likes being the first one up, so he can confirm his reality without all the sideways glances.)

“So?”  Steve says, leaning forward eagerly. 

“Damn useful, if we can get it to work,” Bruce mutters, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

“I am not jumping off any more staircases,” Clint snaps.

“What about—”

“Or buildings!  Or moving vehicles!  I am not Batman, Nat, okay?  I am a _human being,_ and I don’t care if it’s a dream, faceplanting into concrete is never fun.”

Natasha laughs, swinging herself up and cleaning her wrist.  “This has _potential,_ ” she says, eyes glittering.  “Organic creation—it’s almost like natural dreaming.  We can use this to smooth over any fissures in the dream at all, paint over any imperfections—”

“Be careful,” Bruce warns.  Everyone stops their excited chatter to blink at him, confused.  “The reason extractors are so successful is because we _know it’s a dream._ We know there’s impossible architecture and breaks in the fabric.  That’s why we can come out of it, because we know it isn’t real.  This organic creation technique will be useful, but it’s dangerous too.  If we start using it all the time, how will we know the dream is a dream?”

“We have totems,” Steve says.  He should know.  His totem’s been keeping him together for months now. 

Bruce inclines his head, conceding the point.  “True.  Just… be careful, is all.  Keep track.  Don’t use it unless you absolutely have to.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Clint says, clapping his hands.  “We should all probably practice, see if we can get it up to par before this job goes down.”

“When are we doing it, by the way?”

Steve cants his head.  He’s curious too.  So far they’re still in the research stage.  They have basic designs but no real plan, no solid idea to implant.  

“Thor wasn’t too specific, though he wants it done as quickly as possible.  I’d say, what, a month?”

“That’ll work,” Steve says, nodding to himself.  He can do that.  A month to perfect organic creation and get the hallucinations under control.  _I’ve got this.  I’m fine._

“Nat’s gonna infiltrate Loki’s organization next week, try and get close to him and also see who she can forge.”

“You have a cover identity ready?”  Steve asks, surprised.  Natasha’s an excellent forger but it usually takes her a little longer to put together a cover ID.  She’s thorough, and an entire life isn’t exactly easy to fake. 

She smiles.  “I do not need one.”

His eyebrows go up.  “Seriously?  You’re going to infiltrate a mob organization without a cover?”  It’s been a few months since Steve’s worked with her, but last time he checked, he was pretty sure she wasn’t suicidal.  “Anything you need to talk about, Tasha?”

Nat laughs.  “I don’t need one,” she repeats.  “For one, I am Russian.  That’s sketchy enough.  For two, Loki is smart, Thor’s said so himself.  He’ll be expecting spies to have tightly-crafted, carefully-built IDs.”

“He’s a bit of a narcissist, too,” Steve says, catching on.  “He probably thinks anybody who goes after him is going to be high-caliber, won’t make sloppy mistakes.”

“Exactly,” Natasha says smugly.  “So a new girl with holes in her ID, who’s clearly got a spotty past, who’s _hiding_ something—”

“Will have a better chance of getting in than someone whose ID is airtight,” Steve says, nodding.  “You need any backup?”

Natasha trades a look with Clint that makes Steve’s hackles go up, but he ignores it. 

“Sure,” she says after a beat.  “Can you take your work with you?” 

Steve nods, already planning out the logistics of moving Tony’s entire workshop.  “Yeah.  It might be better, actually, to build where I’m close to him.  I can tailor it more specifically, anyway.”

“Alrighty then,” Clint says, looking between them with an unreadable expression on his face.  “Banner?  You staying?”

“Oh yes,” says Bruce, already back to his table of chemicals.  “The last time I tried to get through airport security I was detained for six hours because the bomb dogs thought I was some kind of biological terrorist.”

“To be fair, you could be,” Clint laughs.  Bruce pulls a face at him. 

“Wait, how did you get to Mombasa?”  Steve asks, curious now. 

Bruce gives him a frightening grin.  “I know people.”

Steve pauses.  “Oh god,” he says, a laugh in his voice.  “When did our lives turn into _The Godfather_?”

Clint kicks back, grinning lazily.  “Years ago, big guy.  Where the hell have you been?”

\----

It is not, contrary to popular belief, fun to drink in Germany.  Drinking is a way of life there, and while Steve really has to work at it to get plastered, he can do buzzed just fine, and buzzed is not helping his work ethic.

“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” Tony says, sprawled in the sunlight with a lazy grin on his face.  “I do some of my best work drunk, you know.  Nothing better than alcohol for a little random creativity.”

“There are hundreds of scientific studies that say otherwise,” Steve mutters, rubbing his forehead and trying to concentrate. 

Tony laughs.  “Eh, bunch’a quacks.  I’m not buying it, you know.  Where’s their data, hm?  Why isn’t it out on the Internet for the rest of us to see?  Results need to be accessible by anyone who might want to test the validity of their claim, I demand it—”

“Tony,” Steve says patiently, determinedly not looking at him. 

“It’s a cover up, gotta be,” Tony continues, sing-song.  “Like Roswell, or Area 51, or that time, remember, when Bruce fell asleep in his lab and turned green—”

“That was in a dream, Tony.”

“Oh.”  Tony flicks his hand dismissively.  “Dreams, reality, what’s the difference, right?”

“One is real,” Steve says through gritted teeth, hands buried in plaster so he doesn’t hit something, “and the other isn’t.”

“Bah.  Details.” Tony rolls to his feet, shaking off the dust he’s gathered lying there.  “Jesus, what are you doing?  No, don’t touch that, you’re going to ruin it—”  He reaches forward, knocking Steve’s hand aside and fixing something on the model, muttering under his breath.

Steve stills, startled by how solid Tony is, how warm. 

“Why are you here?”  he asks.

Tony _tsks._ “What, tired of me already, precious?”

“Answer the question, Tony.”

“Well if I had to guess,” Tony drawls, shoving his hands in his pockets, “I’d say you’ve gone batshit, and I’m here to keep you company.  That’s not what you want to hear though, is it?”

Steve says nothing. 

Tony grins.  “I’m here,” he says, slowly and clearly, “because you want me here.  Admit it.”

“I don’t,” Steve snaps. 

“You do.  Otherwise you’d be all better by now.  It’s been a year.  I’d be gone if you didn’t want me here and you know it.” 

“I don’t—”

“Of course,” Tony continues, pacing around Steve, his eyes sharp and dark and glinting, “I could just be a coping mechanism, brought on to try and keep you from developing an ulcer or something.  You should get that checked out, by the way.  Nasty little fuckers.” 

“ _Coping mechanism,_ ” Steve laughs, throwing his head back because it’s so fucking absurd he can’t stand it.  “Coping mechanism, you’re hilarious, you know that?”

Tony grins.  “I try.”

Steve laughs, and laughs, and laughs.  His shoulders shake with the force of it, vibrations rattling all the way down to the floor, across to the model.  The cardboard-and-plaster buildings quake, threatening to fall over. 

“I hate being buzzed,” Steve says, once he’s calmed down enough to breathe. 

“Fucking sucks,” Tony agrees.  “Be drunk or be sober.  Go big or go home, big guy.”

“I’m working.”

Tony shrugs again.  “You’re also hallucinating.  It’s a lose-lose situation, if you look at it.”

Steve smiles, leaning back to lay flat on the floor.  “And I guess you’ve looked at it?”

“Forwards, backwards, and sideways,” Tony sings.  “Any way you look at you’re fucked, honey, and my math is never wrong.  You are S-C-R-E-W-E-D.  It’s gonna be fun.”

“You would say that.”

Tony huffs a laugh, pacing.  His footsteps are steady and familiar.  “You better get ready,” he says, and doesn’t stop pacing, never stops pacing, back and forth, back and forth.

“What do you mean?”

Tony raises a finger to his lips, eyes shadowed.  “You have about ten seconds before Loki’s people come through that door.”

“ _What_?”  Steve’s on his feet before he fully registers what Tony’s saying, grabbing his gun and squaring off against the door, every muscle suddenly tense and straining.

There’s a muffled crash, and a thump, and a voice in harsh, grating German—Steve _really hates_ German—and the door caves inward, followed by the push of bodies. 

Steve doesn’t hesitate.  He fires once, twice, a third time, lashing out at the crush of people.  They shout, startled, and fall back for a second to regroup and dive for cover.

“ _Shit,_ ” Steve snaps, lunging to scoop up the door.  He slams it back into place and quickly drags the couch over, bracing it against the door.  It should hold, for a few minutes anyway.  “Tony, how did you know they were coming?”

Tony gives him a flat, amused look.  “ _I_ was paying attention.  You were too busy moping.  Saw ‘em come in off the street.  I didn’t know they were thugs, but they look thug-y, don’t you think?  It’s like Clint’s dreams all over again.”

“Thanks for warning me,” Steve mutters, but he’s angry at himself and frantic to hide the models.  If Loki finds out what they are—an extractor’s floor plans—then the game is over.  His mind will be prepared and too hostile to deal with, and they’ll have to cut and run—

“Here,” Tony says unexpectedly, pointing to the bathroom.  “Get them wet!” 

Steve obeys, seizing the first model— _shit,_ all his hard work down the drain, literally—and throws it in the bathtub, throwing the tab on hot and grabbing another one. 

Gunshots blow through the flimsy wooden door, tearing out chunks and getting shards of wood everywhere. 

 _Not long now,_ Steve thinks, and tries his best to commit the models to memory so he can rebuild them later—

“I’ve got it,” Tony says, leaning over to watch the glue fall apart and the cardboard fold in on itself.  “Get the last one.”

Steve does, and throws it in the tub with the rest of them.  The buildings crumple, becoming a soggy, sad mess, and Steve licks his lips.

Another gunshot, the sound of splintering wood.  It’s not long now. 

“Can you fit through that window?” Tony asks, straightening.  Spots of water have appeared on his otherwise immaculate suit. 

“Maybe,” Steve says, eyeing it.  If he squeezes—

“Might be a good idea to do so, big guy,” Tony says, and launches himself out the open window. 

Steve doesn’t have time to think—he can hear the thugs at the door now, tearing apart what’s left of it and scrambling over the sofa—and so he follows, forcing his way through and out onto the fire escape. 

He falls five feet and the impact jars his knees, and there’s Tony halfway up the stairs.

“Wrong way,” Steve says.  The street’s below, he needs to get out of here, how did Loki know he was being watched? 

“Trust me,” Tony says. 

The extractor looks him up and down, feels the weight of his totem in his pocket.  “Okay,” he says, and follows. 

They go up the fire escape together, taking the stairs three at a time.  Down below, Steve hears the thugs trashing his apartment, searching for him, overturning tables and chairs and the mantelpiece. 

 _Thank god I didn’t have a PASIV down there,_ Steve thinks.  He and Nat didn’t bring one—they’re hard to come by these days, and Clint would kill them if they lost one—and the models are wrecked, so Loki won’t be able to know who they were, and what they wanted to do. 

That, at least, is a relief.

Steve and Tony are nearly to the roof by the time the thugs think to check the open window, and they look straight down, swearing, instead of up.  Three of them clamor out and race down the stairs, crashing all the way.  The others disappear back into the room, presumably to do a sweep.

Steve heaves a sigh of relief.  “Thank god for idiot henchmen,” he tells Tony, who laughs and grins wildly. 

“That was fun,” he says.  “Damn shame about the models, though, that was what, a week’s worth of hard work?”

“C’mon,” Steve says, straightening and adjusting his jacket.  “We should probably go.”

Together they work their way across the roof and back down into the hotel, keeping an eye out for any thugs. 

Steve switches his jacket for a suit coat and combs his hair back, snatching some sunglasses from his pocket and a tie from an unattended doorknob.  Tony doesn’t change, but, well, he’s a hallucination.  He doesn’t have to. 

The hotel lobby is bustling, an excellent place to hide out in, but Steve’s not interested in staying here.  He needs to find Natasha and make sure she’s alright. 

Outside there’s a nip in the air and a breeze that ruffles his hair.  Stuttgart air tastes like concrete and metal, and it’s easy to disappear into the crowds of tourists and shoppers following the sunset to the theaters and museums and art shows. 

Tony stays with Steve the whole time, steady, bouncing at his side and scanning the crowds for any sign of a threat. 

Neither of them speak. 

Steve keeps his hand curled around his gun, just in case, and wishes he had the foresight to bring more ammo. 

They make it about four blocks away from the hotel before someone shouts “ _dort!_ ” and Steve sees a big man over the heads of the crowd, brown-haired and mean, shoving pedestrians aside with huge hands.

“Run,” Tony says, very calmly, and Steve bolts. 

He dives through the crowd, battering his way to the openness of the alleys, running through minefields of trash and twisted, abandoned metal.  Behind them the thugs give chase, crashing as they follow.

“How many?”  Steve asks. 

“Enough,” Tony says grimly.

Steve swears, turning down another narrow alley and then another and another, trying to shake Loki’s hunters.  But they know the area, know the twists and turns of the city, and Steve has no idea where he’s going. 

He overturns carts, dodges cars, and lunges through packs of people, scattering anything and everything he can get his hands on to try and slow up his pursuers. 

It’s no use. 

For every move he makes the thugs make another, boxing him in.  Steve’s been hounded by projections hundreds of times.  He knows when he’s cornered. 

They finally box him in in a little dead-end alley off a main street, and Steve’s back is pressed to the wall, Tony tucked beside him, and he raises his gun. 

He didn’t imagine that it would end like this, but, well.  He’s known it was coming. 

The thugs hem him in, their own guns raised, fingers curled.  The message is pretty clear.  One move, and Steve won’t be dreaming any more.

“What do you want?”  Steve barks, and tries to cover Tony even though he knows he’s just a hallucination, just a shadow. 

The thugs ignore him.  The big one says something into a cell phone, eyeing Steve.  He doesn’t shoot him, though.  Steve supposes that’s a good thing. 

“ _Ja,_ ” says the thug, and closes his phone.  He jerks his chin at his friends, and they back up, dropping their weapons and standing at attention.

“Oh shit,” Tony sings, and he’s smiling against Steve’s back, that wide, shit-eating grin he’d get when he had figured something out before the rest of them.

Steve hates that smile.

A car, sleek and black and very, very expensive, pulled up at the mouth of the alley.  Steve closes his eyes.

The man who steps out of the limo is tall, dark-haired, and pale, his green eyes flashing with wicked amusement.  He nods to the thugs, and smiles widely at Steve. 

“Well, well, well,” says Loki Odinsson, “what have we here?”


	3. iii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, hey, so sorry this is a few days late! I meant to post it on Saturday, but then I wandered through the Dark Knight Rises tag on tumblr and have been unsuccessfully trying to cope with those feels. My bad. 
> 
> Anyway, this bit is less Inception-oriented and more technical, because to get to the Inception parts there needs to be some good ol' fashioned detective bits. Sorry about that!
> 
> Many, many thanks to Leah for the beta! 
> 
> Also now with more Clint, because seriously, he's awesome.

shooting stars, falling objects

 

The thing is, Clint Barton is not an idiot.  He’s point, for god’s sake; it’s his _job_ to be smart.  Yeah, yeah, he’s not Bruce- or Tony-smart, and Steve’s a bit better at tactics than him, but he can add two and two together and more besides, thank you very much.  (And when it comes to details, the little pieces that make a whole picture, there’s no one better than Clint.  It’s why he’s an excellent point and a really shitty architect.)

So when he gets a text from Tasha’s cell at two in the morning, the alarm bells go off in his head and he’s halfway to the door before he even reads the text. 

_Shawarma?_     

“Fuck me,” he says, and resists the urge to smack his head against the wall. 

Shawarma.  Fuck.

Shawarma means a few things, when it comes from Nat.  Shawarma means _danger, red, incoming,_ means _pay the fuck attention._ Shawarma means _I’m in trouble._ Shawarma means _I’m about to do something really, monumentally stupid, Barton, so brace yourself and roll with it._

Clint reads the message over and over again, studying the line of code.  Shawarma means a lot of things, but it always, _always_ means trouble.  Clint’s smart enough to know that.  Fortunately for the rest of the idiots he works with, he’s also smart enough to plan ahead.

“Coulson!” he bellows.  “We’ve got a situation!”

\----

“Welcome to my humble abode,” Loki says, pulling the hood off Steve’s head with a flourish.  Steve blinks in the harsh light, and Loki smiles, all teeth. 

Steve shakes his head, looking around the room with an extractor’s eyes, picking out exits (just one, the door, which Loki blocks with his body) and getting a sense of where he is.  It’s a grand old ballroom, the kind you’d find in a hotel from the 1920s, all gilt and gold and marble. 

It’s past its prime, though.  The gold is burnished and bruised, the gilded walls peel, and the marble floor is cracked and even missing, in some places.  All the other doors have been barricaded, wood piled on year after year to cover up the rotten bits.  A chandelier, hung with cobwebs, sways in a wind that whistles through broken windows higher up.  The whole place is dusty and dim, a shadow of a ballroom.  The entire effect is menacing, and a little sad.

That, Steve thinks, is probably the point.

Loki Odinsson grins at Steve, pats his cheek, and turns sharply on his heel, emerald green scarf flapping, to speak to his goons in German that from his mouth seems almost smooth.

Steve blinks again, trying to shake of the disorientation of being kidnapped, blindfolded, and shoved into the trunk of a car. 

_I’m getting old,_ he thinks, half amused but mostly annoyed. He rolls his stiff shoulders, trying not to wince. 

Odinsson, done with his mooks, turns back to Steve, one elegant eyebrow raised, green eyes flashing.  He’s everything Steve expected, really.  Tall, lean, well-groomed, with an intensity much like Thor’s but somehow sharper, somehow wilder.   Loki has dark hair, slicked back over his ears, and vivid eyes.  He speaks German smoothly, grins easily, and moves like a man who has too much energy, who bursts with it, can’t hold it all the way in. 

“So,” he says, in English without even a trace of an accent, “who are you, and why were you spying on me?”

Steve doesn’t say anything.  He really has no good answer for this question, not yet.  He’ll think of something soon, but he’s still disoriented, still running on adrenaline. 

Loki sighs.  “Not many people know that I use Le Méridien Stuttgart as a front.  Fewer people still know that Room 479 has a perfect view of the inner garden, where my clients and I do business.”

Steve stares ahead stonily.  That was the exact reason why Clint set him up in 479, but they should’ve known better.  Thor told them that Loki was smart.  “Let me guess,” Steve says.  “You have anybody who books that room checked out?”

The youngest son of Odin laughs, delighted.  “Not just a hired thug, are you?  There’s something in that pretty head of yours.”

_Hired thug?_

“I have some friends of mine run background checks on whoever checks into Room 479, yes.  More often than not, it’s just tourists, visiting dignitaries, and so on.  But every now and then, I get the ones like _you._ ”  Loki paces, back and forth, hands behind his back.  “Spies, mostly.  Hit men every now and then, once an actual assassin.  A quick word to my friends in the hotel and the problems are dealt with.  Most of them quietly, but today I thought I’d leave a message.”

“Message?”

The grin Loki gives him is downright frightening.  “To my enemies,” he explains.  “Whoever hired you.  Tell me, was it Hogun?  Laufey?”

“No one hired me,” Steve says.  An idea forms in his mind, ragged and just an outline, but still a plan.  “So, you ran a background check on me and came up with what?”  Steve was checked in under a false name, an ID he’s used a dozen times all over the world, building a credit with it.  There’s nothing under that name to find. 

“Nothing, at first.”  A wickedness springs into Loki’s bright eyes, a sort of vicious pleasure that only a man who thinks he’s the smartest person in the room gets.  “Steven Stark is a very normal, very boring man.  But you’re not Steven Stark are you, Mr. Rogers?”

Steve freezes.  _Oh, shit._ His mind tears through a dozen possibilities, plans half formed and fleeting before diving on to the next one, and the next, and the next, his mind whirling. 

Loki knows who he is.  Loki knows, and that means Loki might know what Steve does, and they’ve lost their chance—

“You found him,” says Natasha, striding into the ballroom like she already owns the place.  Two goons hiss at her, reaching to pull her back, but Loki smiles and waves them off. 

Steve stares. 

“Aha,” Loki hums, hooking a friendly arm around Natasha’s waist.  “Yes.  You do know each other, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Nat says.  “I told you, he’s my partner.  We were hired to kill you.”

Loki laughs, long and deep, and Steve just sort of stares.  _What?_ So it was Natasha who told them that Steven Stark wasn’t a real person, was an alias.  Why did she do _that_? 

“You look confused,” Odinsson laughs.  “Poor thing.  You didn’t wonder where your partner had disappeared to?  Didn’t think she might have changed allegiances since you saw her last?  You should’ve known better.  The Black Widow is known for shifting loyalties.”

Natasha smiles and untangles herself from Loki’s side, a twisting, flirtatious move that means she’s playing a part, she’s playing him, _they’re still in the game._ “My loyalty is to whoever pays me,” she says, low, throaty, with just a hint of her Russian roots shining through.  “And I feel like _you_ would pay me much, much more.”

“Traitor,” Steve spits.  He’s caught on— _just a little slow on the uptake, genius,_ he hears Tony mock, in the back of his mind—and he can do this, can play a part.  He’s no forger but he’s fairly intelligent, and dreamshare’s always been a bit of an interdisciplinary job anyway.

Natasha smirks.  “Good old soldier,” she taunts. “Loyal to the end.”

Loki smiles.  “You do have quite an impressive Interpol file, Mr. Rogers.  A soldier, American-born, served two tours of duty in Afghanistan.  You were dishonorably discharged, _shame_ on you, suspected in the death of James Barnes, and dropped off the radar for some time.  Implicated in the deaths of Obadiah Stane, Peggy Carter, Virginia Potts, and Anthony Stark.”

_He thinks I’m a hit man,_ Steve realizes, trying to flinch at those names.  _He thinks I kill people for a living, that I killed Bucky and ran for it._

Natasha’s face gives nothing away, but she’s telling him to go along with it.  She probably spread that herself, probably planted the idea in Loki’s head.  Later—if there’s time—she has some _explaining_ to do, but for now, Steve has his own skin to save.

“So?”  he says.  “You runs drugs and guns.  How is what I do different from what you do?”

Loki laughs again, almost reflexively.  “Fair enough, I suppose.  Tell me, Mr. Rogers, who sent you?”

If he’s talked to Natasha, he already knows.  She’ll have said Thor.  That’s the kind of gambit she goes for, the kind of manipulation she uses.  Natasha tells half-truths, uses it like a weapon.  Steve meets her eyes. 

She blinks once.

“You already know that,” Steve says.

“I want to hear you say it.”  It’s a hiss, a wounded snake’s death-rattle, forced between Loki’s clenched teeth.  His face is pale, almost translucent, but his eyes burn.

“Thor Odinsson,” Steve says. 

Loki throws back his head and laughs and laughs, teeth bared.  His shoulders shake.  That intensity he has, sharper than knives, seems to double and Steve understands what Clint said before now, understands that here is a man who is barely hanging on to the finest threads of _sane._

Fantastic.

“I knew it,” Loki mutters, pacing again, around and around.  “My own brother.  Ashamed of me, they’re always ashamed—But no.”  He straightens suddenly, throwing his shoulders back, tall and imposing.  “I have the pair of you now.”

Natasha smirks again, flirting, coy.  Steve just eyes Loki stonily.  (He can do disillusioned soldier like nobody’s business.) 

“Natasha here has already agreed to work with me,” he hums, pulling her closer again.  This time she lets him, laughing softly.  “I can pay you very well, Mr. Rogers.  Better than my brother, better than anyone.  I reward those who deserve it.  You’re a very talented man, and you’d do well here with us.”

Steve doesn’t pretend to fall for it, not yet.  That would be too easy.  Loki is smart, he remembers, Loki is cunning, Loki is vicious. 

Odinsson grins again, that flash of teeth, that wolf’s smile.  “Ah, yes.  The loyal soldier.  Tell me, how did it make you feel, when they threw you to the dogs?  When they stripped you of everything you had worked for?  You were wounded, yes?  You bled for them, and they cast you out.  Like a leper.”

Steve lets anger flash on his face, and grief, too.  (The grief is real.  The discharge hadn’t been a surprise, but it still stung.  He would have thought that his unit, the men he’d fought with and laid his heart down for, would’ve known that he didn’t—would never, could never—kill Bucky.) 

Loki’s eyes glitter.  “You were alone, weren’t you?  No one likes a dishonorable soldier.”

“Couldn’t get work,” Steve grunts, playing along.  “No one would trust me.”

“And that made you desperate,” Loki says sympathetically, his face wide-open and he looks _young,_ guileless, innocent.  Steve can see how he’s gathered so much power already.  It would be almost too easy to believe in everything Loki Odinsson is saying.  “Who hired you first?”

“Anthony Stark,” Steve mutters.  Half-truths, just like Natasha taught him.  Half-truths and the rest a pack of sweet-whispered lies.  “He thought Stane was trying to kill him, at first.  Hired me as a bodyguard.”

“And then?” 

_He’s trying to gain a hold over me,_ Steve realizes.  _He’s playing the part of a good listener, building an emotional attachment.  Like inception, but without the dreams._ “Then, he had me kill Stane.  He figured it’d be easier to kill the guy than deal with him.”

“After that?”

Steve shrugs, a lifetime of gunfire and death expressed in the slope of his shoulders.  “I got work.”

Loki nods, eyes flashing.  “Why did you kill Mr. Stark?”

“I didn’t,” Steve says, fiercely.  “He was my boss, he signed my paychecks.  He—he looked out for me.  I’d never kill him.”  This is a lie.  Steve killed Tony dozens of times down below.  A bullet was quicker than a kick, and he never liked Tony shooting himself anyway.  This lie serves a purpose, though.  Loki thinks Steve is the loyal soldier.  Soldiers don’t turn on their commanders. 

“Then how did he die?” 

“I didn’t think she, of all people, would try and hurt him,” he says, bitterness creeping into his voice.  _Sorry, Pepper._ “But then it’s always the redhead, isn’t it?  She had a gun.  I wasn’t fast enough, Stark trusted her—”

He stops.  It’s hard, lying about Pepper like that.  Pepper would never hurt Tony.  She loved him almost as much as Steve did.  He suddenly wants to palm his totem. 

“You killed her in revenge, then.”

Steve nods.  He’s gritting his teeth so hard they hurt. 

Loki smiles.  “Did it feel good?  Your revenge?”

Steve shruggs.  “Felt alright.”

“I know a thing or two about revenge,” Loki laughs again, head thrown back.  Everything about him seems exaggerated, calculated for the greatest effect.  It’s almost like Loki’s playing a part too, even if he doesn’t know it.  “What loyalty do you owe my brother, little soldier?”

Steve tilts his head, considering.  Natasha doesn’t look at him, but her body language is clear.  _Sell it,_ she’s telling him.  _Sell it like your life depends on it, because the job certainly does._

Loki doesn’t know that Steve’s an extractor.  He thinks he’s a hit man, some sort of rejected soldier taking his anger out on others.  (The only person Steve’s ever actually killed outside of a warzone is Stane.  He had it coming, and it was self-defense anyway.)  He wonders for a second what happened to make Natasha concoct this lie.  She’s not one to go off the plan, usually, but if she’s spun it this way, she has a reason.

Steve blinks once.  Twice.  A confirmation.  “Way I see it,” he says slowly, falling into his old soldier habits.  Shoulders back.  Eyes ahead.  No pain, no fear on his face.  Deep, even breaths.  “I don’t owe your brother anything.”

Loki’s teeth flash again, his eyes the color of old emerald.  “Your whole life was taken from you,” he says.  “Your job, your self-respect, your honor.  You became a gun-for-hire.  You suffered.”

Steve meets Odinsson’s eyes, unfaltering. 

“Mr. Rogers,” murmurs Loki, smooth as a snake, motioning a goon to come and untie him, “there is a way back.  There is a way to be good again.”

“Please,” Steve says, standing and rolling his shoulders, getting the blood flowing again.  He cuts Nat a glance, and she nods.  “Call me Steve.”

\----

“How the _hell_ did this happen?”  Steve hisses later, tucked into a decrepit supply closet with Natasha.

She shrugs.  “One of Loki’s thugs recognized me as the Black Widow.  After that, the holes in my ID started to look a lot like an assassin’s threats.  Loki had me questioned, and instead of wrecking his men and losing our chance, I played it off like I was on the run from my employers, trying to hide among other criminals.”

“And he bought it?”

Natasha gives him a withering look.  “Of course he bought it.  Fury hasn’t exactly made his hunt for me quiet, and Odinsson liked the thought of the Black Widow under his thumb.  He gave me sanctuary.  I gave him you.” 

“What if he’d killed me?”

“He wouldn’t,” Tasha says.  “He’s not the type to waste good help, if he can get his hands on it.  He’s looking to create a crime syndicate—dozens of littler families all under his thumb—and anybody who can help him reach that goal he’s going to use.”

Steve runs his hands through his hair, shaking his head.  “You do realize this doesn’t make our job any easier, right?  We’re the new faces.  He’ll be keeping an eye on us.”

“Not a close enough one,” she says, savage triumph gleaming in her eyes.  “I’ve been here for half a week, Steve, and he already lets me wander around the hotel as I please.  He’s too arrogant.  He thinks that because he surrounds himself with dangerous people, he’s not in any danger.”

“So, what?  We run into his room, grab him, force him under?  That’s it?  It can’t be that easy,” he mutters.  “No crime boss is that overconfident.”

“No,” Natasha agrees.  “It won’t be that easy.  Loki’s a sneaky one.  He never sleeps in the same place twice, if he sleeps at all.  He hasn’t, since I’ve been here.”

“He’s crazy,” Steve adds.

“You don’t know the half of it.  He’s lucid, most of the time, but when he gets particularly angry, he just…goes.  He’s not with us anymore, he’s in his own head, and he gets _dangerous._ He killed a man yesterday, threw a knife across the room because the man had lost sight of some kid who stole a pound of coke.” 

Steve winces.  “We’re going to have to be careful,” he says.  “He can’t know we’re in extraction.”

She gives him a look that says, _no shit._ “Your phone’s gone.  Mine too.  I texted Barton before I ditched it.”

“What did you tell him?”

A wicked gleam, not unlike Loki’s, sparks in her eye.  “Shawarma.”

Steve doesn’t know whether to laugh or groan.  “Shawarma.”  It was Tony’s code word, once upon a time.  It means _oh shit,_ it means _code red,_ it means _run the fuck away_ or _get the fuck here_ depending on the situation. 

If Nat sent it to Clint, he’ll be in Stuttgart within a few hours.  They won’t see him, but he’ll be there, probably with Coulson and Bruce in tow. 

They won’t be alone. 

Steve nods.  “Okay,” he says.  “So what’s the plan?”

Natasha grins.  “Come with me.”  She ducks out of the dusty closet, prowling down the halls.  Steve follows her, military style with his steps measured. 

The thugs let them pass without any issues.  Loki’s spread the word that they’re not enemies, apparently.  Some of them even nod to Steve respectfully. 

_Can he really trust us this much already?_ Steve thinks, bewildered.  Loki is letting them wander around his hotel—clearly his base of operations—unguarded and unsupervised.  They could do so much damage and no one could stop them.  Either Loki really is that arrogant and overconfident, or he’s planning something and they haven’t caught on yet.

Steve’s willing to bet it’s the second one.  Arrogant gunrunners don’t tend to live long. 

Natasha stops at a crumbling door, jiggles the dented knob experimentally.  It doesn’t open.  There’s an old brass lock set into the door, and it wouldn’t be that difficult to just force it open, but then Steve sees the little wires wrapped around the hinges.  The door is alarmed. 

“Not so trusting, then,” Steve says. 

Natasha nods.  “There’s a few other doors like this around the hotel.  Loki doesn’t trust us, not all the way.  He just thinks money can get him everything.  Muscle, assassins, drugs, guns, you name it.”

“What’s the plan?”

“So far?  I don’t know.  We need to watch Loki, and get his trust.  After that, well.  We’ll have to see.” 

“We’ll have to see,” Steve mutters.  “Great.  Any idea how long it’ll be?”

She shrugs again and she’s settling in for the long con, Steve can tell.  “No,” she says. 

He sighs.  He needs to make his models again, needs to get ahold of Bruce and Clint, needs to sleep, needs to talk to Tony.  “Okay,” he says, rolling his shoulders again.  The soldier comes down on him, stiff-backed and familiar.  “Let’s get to it, then.”

\----

Steve doesn’t dream naturally, not anymore.  It’s been a good five years since he’s had a dream without the help of somnacin. 

He doesn’t miss it, all that much.

His dreams now are more.  They’re sharp, they’re clear, they’re so _real_ they leave him scrambling for his totem, rubbing his fingers over smooth metal over and over.  He can see how it’s addictive, how people like them crowd the dreaming dens in Mombasa and sleep like it’s waking. 

When he doesn’t have somnacin, he doesn’t dream.  That’s nice too, sometimes, to just sleep in sticky blackness.  There’s no dreams, no light, no noise. 

There’s Tony, though.  There’s always Tony, dreaming or not, the smell of him, the sound of his laugh, the tickle of his beard against Steve’s neck. 

“Oh baby,” Tony says, in the dark against Steve’s eyelids.  “You gotta stop doing this.”

“I know,” Steve would say if he was dreaming.  “I know, Tony, believe me.  I know.”

\----

“Baby, you gotta stop doing this,” Tony hums, standing over Steve.  The extractor groans, rolling over.  For a split second he’s disoriented, looking up at a water-stained ceiling that was once edged in gold paint.  The carpet’s soft but smells like must, and dust spirals in weak morning light, making him sneeze.

Steve sits up.  “Where am I?”

“Odinsson’s hotel,” Tony says.  “Don’t you remember?  Crazy fucker grabbed us—well, you—off the streets, holed us up in his fortress.  That was some grade-A acting back there, I gotta say.  You had him convinced.”

Steve remembers.  He winces, rubbing his neck.  Pain flares up and down in little sparks, crackling his spine.   _Man, I am getting old._ “Yeah, I remember.”

“Bet you don’t remember these, though,” Tony says, gesturing at the desk.  Even from here Steve can see that it’s covered in paper.  His heart sinks. 

“I blacked out again, didn’t I.”

Tony nods.  “Oh yeah.  Big time.  Such a shame, too, I was seriously traumatized yesterday, I needed some TLC.”

“You’re dead, Tony.”

“Obviously, but still.  I have feelings!”  He offers Steve his hand.  Steve ignores it and stands, shaking off sleep and dust. 

On the desk, he’s drawn the models, layers and layers of them on paper in intricate, intersecting lines.  The feeling of a black out, gritty, almost metallic, blinds him for a minute, and he sways. 

“ _Easy,_ ” Tony hisses, starting forward, but Steve jerks away.  Tony stops.  “You should sit down or something, Steve.  Haven’t I told you that if you fall over and crack your head open, I’m pretty much useless?”

“You’ve said something like that before,” Steve says, perching on the edge of the bed.  He smiles, and his mouth feels sticky. 

Tony huffs, settling beside him.  The bed dips under his weight.  “You shouldn’t be here, Steve.” 

“Why not?  We’re working.”

“Loki’s no good for you,” Tony says.  “He’s crazy, Steve, he’s not safe.”

“I know he’s crazy,” Steve points out.

Tony snorts.  “No, seriously.  He’s not the kind of person you should be around.  He’s not—he’s not normal.  He’s bad for someone like you.”

“Someone like me?”

“You know.” Tony waves a hand.  “Not all the way there, up here.”  He taps his forehead.  “Oh, don’t give me that look, you know it’s true.  I’m dead, pumpkin, you’ve said it yourself.  But here I am, talking to you _again._ Shades and hallucinations aren’t a sign of good mental health, dear, hate to break it to you.”

“So, what, you think he’s going to make me worse?”

Tony shrugs.  “Maybe.  I don’t know, when I see crazy people, I run.”

“Liar.”

The hallucination laughs, his shoulders shaking.  “Point.  Seriously, though.  You should leave.”

“And leave Tasha alone with him?”

“You and I both know she can take care of herself.”

Steve shrugs.  “I won’t leave her here, not if Loki could hurt her.  She’s my friend, Tony.  I’ve lost enough of you.”

Tony makes a distressed noise, bounding to his feet and pacing, back and forth on the thick carpet.  “What if he makes you worse?  You’re already having black outs and hallucinations, Steve.  Don’t let yourself go crazy.”

“What do you care?  If I go crazy, I’ll see you more often.”

Tony smiles, bright and fake and cracking.  “I’m a manifestation of your subconscious, Steven.  Of course I don’t want you to go insane.  Self-preservation and all that.”

The extractor huffs a laugh, standing again to look over his blueprints.  “The best way to do that is to help me,” he says.  “You notice things.  Tell me how to take down Loki, and we can get the job going.”

“You know what to do,” Tony says immediately.  “Or Barton will, soon enough.  Loki’s fucking crazy, but he’s smart, right?  Not at smart as me, granted, but pretty smart, and he’s messed up.  He’s mad at his brother and his father.”

“Yeah, we know that already.  We’re going to plant the idea that he can run the legit business better than his brother.”

“How?”

Steve blinks.  “Haven’t thought that part out yet.  Clint’s the one who does that.”

“Clint isn’t here, is he?  So _think._ What does Loki want?”

“To prove that he’s better than his father and his brother.” 

“It’s gotta be deeper than that.”

“He was quick to get me and Tash on his side,” he says slowly, turning it over in his head.  “He wants us to help him, wants to build a syndicate of families—”

“Bingo,” Tony sings.  “He wants to run all the crime in the continent.”

“If he does that, it’ll be almost like ruling the world,” Steve mutters.  “He’ll have whatever he wants, cars, women, money, good food.  He’ll never need anything ever again.”  He joins Tony, pacing around and around.  Outside, there’s the harsh mutter of German and the thump of feet.  The thugs are on the move. 

“So how do we get to him, using that?”

Steve shrugs, cracking open his door to peer outside.  Something’s happening.  All the members of Loki’s crew are heading downstairs, muttering to each other.  Steve sees Natasha in the crowd, and she meets his eyes.

“ _Shawarma,_ ” she mouths.

“Damn,” Steve mutters, closing his door and grabbing his carefully-drawn blueprints, folding them and tucking them in his jacket. 

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” he says, throwing open the door and joining the herd.  Tony goes at his side, carefully avoiding everyone else. 

They follow the others to what once was the hotel lobby.  Thugs crowd dilapidated couches and rickety chairs, and the rest line the walls.  Steve joins Natasha, leaning casually against the wall. 

“What’s happening?”

“Loki has a guest,” she murmurs.

“Who?”

“No idea,” she murmurs, “but if we wanna get in touch with Barton, now’s the time.  Everyone in the building is down here.”

Steve nods, keeping a wary eye out as he slips away, Tony following in his shadow.  Natasha joins him a few moments later, and together they prowl down the abandoned hallways.  There’s a cell phone lying inside someone’s room, and Natasha grabs it, flicking it on and taping out a complicated series of numbers. 

“Not encrypted,” she explains.  “Loki’s smart enough to check anybody who books a hotel room, he’s probably got an eye on his workers’ phones.”  After a minute, she’s satisfied with the security and punches in Clint’s number. 

The phone rings once, twice, and then Clint says, clearly wary, “ _hello_?”

“Mr. Hawk!”  Natasha laughs, dropping in to an almost French accent.  “Hello, ‘ow are you?  I am fine, I am fine, I am at the grandest old hotel in Stuttgart, right by the riverside, with the _most_ charming company, though there are too many cats.”

Steve chokes back a laugh. 

“ _I’m sorry to hear that,_ ” Clint says. 

“Yes, is very sad, but me and the Captain, we are having a good time.   We are learning so many new things about our new friends.  They lead such interesting lives, you know?  The kind I could only dream of.  When will I see you again, dearest?”

“ _I was thinking in two days?  Stuttgart has the best museums in Germany.  I like the architecture especially.  Some of the rooftops almost look like nests.”_

“Sounds wonderful, darling.  Oh, and don’t forget to give the dog his pills.  You know how grumpy he gets when he doesn’t sleep well.”

“ _Will do.  See you._ ”

“Bye, dearest.” 

She ends the call, a gleam in her eyes.

Steve groans.  “You just told him to bring the PASIV, didn’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“We’re not ready!  Two days isn’t nearly enough time to prepare, you know that.  We don’t even have a plan!”

Tony laughs softly.

“Better start thinking,” she says grimly.  “We don’t have the _time._ Loki’s paranoid.  He’ll get suspicious of us soon.  We have to work quickly.”

She has a point.  Loki let them in, trusted them to wander around his hotel, but he hasn’t told them anything yet, and he has locked doors.  As soon as he’s not coordinating for guests, well.  

“Okay,” Steve says.  “Two days.”

Natasha smiles and puts the phone back.  “Come on, then.  We should meet Mr. Odinsson’s new guest.”

“Yes,” Tony says, quietly, intimately, so it’s barely more than a whisper down Steve’s neck.  “We should.”

\----

Clint’s totem is a rook.  It’s a castle in the old style, a turrent ringed by even, strong squares. The wood, once dark, rich mahogany, is worn down to white in spots, and the crown on top is worn down to just stubs.

It was a gift from a lifetime ago, back when he was just a skinny kid with sharp eyes and not nearly enough sense to keep from showing off.  The ringmaster didn’t see the point of teaching Clint to read ( _doesn’t need to read to shoot arrows, now does he?_ ), let alone something like chess, but there was an old woman who told fortunes from the lines in a man’s palms, and she took the time to teach him.

Clint knew pawns, bishops, knights, and queens before he knew the letters of the alphabet.  He loved chess, the long game, planning six, eight, ten moves in advance.  The feel of the pieces under his fingers, wooden, steady.  Unchanging.

The rook was the only thing he took with him when he left, aside from his bow.  Usually he doesn’t use it much.  It’s a good totem, solid, reliable (the woman who gave it to him is dead), but he doesn’t need it very often.  Clint has an eye for details.  Dreams and reality rarely match up, and he just needs the weight of it is his pocket to know.

Right about now, though, he needs it.

“Are you even seeing this?” Bruce mutters, pressed up against the glass, and Clint closes his eyes.

“Yeah,” he says, swiping his thumb over the worn wood.  “I think so.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah,” he says again.  “Huh.”

Clint has seen some very, _very_ strange things in his life.  He was raised in a circus, for god’s sake, and he’s been in the business for over a decade now.  It takes _a lot_ to surprise him.

The man standing the in the middle of Loki Odinsson’s hotel is certainly _a lot._ He’s huge, for one, easily seven feet tall and built like a fucking tank.  Clint’s two hundred yards away and four stories up and he can still see the veins bulging in the man’s arms.  He’s also not wearing a shirt.  That’s weird, Clint kind of wants to know what’s up with that, but even that’s not the strangest part.

The guy is blue.

Tattoos cover every inch of his skin in wild, twisting lines, a maze written out in deep blue ink.  There’s not a single patch of bare skin anywhere Clint can see, and the effect is flat-out _scary._

“D’you know who that is?”

Clint nods.  “Yeah,” he says, and it sounds strange even to his ears.  “That’s Laufey the Frost Giant.”

Bruce blinks.  “Who?”

“Oh shit.  Uh, Laufey.  He’s another crime lord—Odin’s main rival—and he’s _not supposed to be in Germany,_ what the fuck.”    

Clint’s got his laptop open in seconds and he flicks through his files.  He doesn’t have a single note anywhere about Loki being in business with Laufey, but this is apparently the third or fourth meeting this week.  He didn’t even consider it.  Odin and Laufey were such deeply-entrenched enemies that they couldn’t be in the same country together without starting a gang war. 

It makes sense, though, that Loki would reach out to his father’s enemy.  If he’s trying to break away from his father, this is a damn good way to do it. 

“ _Shit,_ ” Clint snarls.  He slams the computer shut.

Bruce arches an eyebrow. 

“We have to move,” he explains. 

“Uh, why?”

“Laufey’s an old-timer,” Clint explains.  “He’s been running his organization for something close to fifty years now.  He can spot a fake from miles away, doesn’t matter how good they are.  Tash is half-mafia, she _might_ be okay, but _Steve?_ Kid can barely lie his way out of a paper bag, let alone to the Frost Giant.”

“He fooled Loki,” Bruce points out.

“I’m not so sure.”  Clint is not an idiot, and he’s something of a chessmaster.  (Not that he’s bragging, or anything.)  He knows the moves like he knows how to run point, like he knows the hum of his bow and the shape of the wind.  He knows when he’s dealing with another chessmaster too, and Loki sure as hell seems like one. 

And to chessmasters, there are no mistakes, no bad moves.   There are calculated sacrifices, carefully-chosen moves, a pawn tossed away here, a knight allowed close there, a pair of bishops brought in close and then caught by a hungry queen.

If Loki let Steve and Nat in his little gang, without any waiting, any caution—and if he let them near _phones,_ Jesus Christ—then he knows.  He has to know.  There’s no way Loki let them in by accident, or that he fell for their story. 

Nat probably knows this.  Clint’s not too worried about her, she can take care of herself.  Steve, he’s concerned for. 

Steve’s been _off_ for a while now, since that shitstorm in Berlin.  He says he’s okay, and Clint knows the best thing for trauma is work, but still.  He doesn’t need any more bad things happening to him.

And if Laufey, with his reputation for brutality, is in, is within a mile of Steve and Tash, well. 

They can’t afford to waste any time.  They were supposed to have another few weeks to plan, to streamline everything.  And they should have a couple of days still, Bruce has enough tranquilizer to reenact _Sleeping Beauty,_ but time is of the essence. 

They have to move.

“Banner, you got the drugs ready?”

Bruce shoots him a look, but nods.  “Yeah, we’re good.  I’d like a few more days to tweak, but we could go now, if we had to.”

“Not now,” Clint says.  “We have to grab him first.”

Bruce raises the other eyebrow.  “Wait, grab _Loki?_ Are you crazy?”

Clint palms his totem again, just to check.  “Yeah, we’re good.”

“We don’t even have a plan!”

“How much tranq do you have?”

“Enough to keep him under for four, five days max.”

Clint nods, already planning it out.  “Okay, so we wait, grab him tonight.  Hopefully Steve and Natasha will be okay ‘til then.  They should be, she’ll keep him out of trouble.  We take Loki out of the country, back west.  We call up Thor, plan out the layers.  We go in, get this shit done, and get the fuck out.”

Banner’s lips twist unhappily, but he nods.  “No way out, huh?”

(If Tony were here, he’d say, _there’s always a way out_.  But he’s not here, and Clint doesn’t see one, not yet.) 

“C’mon,” he says instead, letting go of his totem.  “We gotta move.”        

He leaves the PASIV tucked under his chair, shining dully in the bright morning light.

\----

“Shhh,” Tony whispers, pressed up against Steve, flush and warm, “listen.  I think you can hear them from here.”

Steve swallows and turns to Natasha.  “I think I can hear them,” he says lowly.  “Right here.”  He taps the dull bronze vent and she leans in, frowning. 

She hovers above the vent, listening intently, and nods.  “Yeah,” she whispers back.  “Here’s good.  Don’t put your ear right on it, you’ll only hear your heartbeat.” 

Steve obeys, bending close and straining to hear Loki and his strange guest.  The same man has visited twice since they called Clint a few days ago, and today they got their first look at him.  They only saw the huge, tattooed man for a second before he and Loki disappeared into the hotel, presumably into one of the locked rooms, and he’s important, Steve just knows he is. 

Tony thinks so.

Down below, Steve can make out faint strains of German, rising and falling up through the grates.  “Damn,” he mutters.  “I don’t speak German.”

“It’s not German,” Tasha hisses. “It’s Swedish.  Now _shh._ ”

“Yeah, Steve,” Tony says.  “Shh.”

Steve glares at his obnoxious hallucination but obeys, shutting up so Tasha can listen in. 

Steve catches certain words, _kanoner, drömmen, Odin,_ but none of it makes sense to him.  He thumbs his totem anxiously, checking down the hallways to make sure they’re not being watched. 

So far they’re good, but still.  He can’t shake the feeling that Loki wants them here, that he knows _exactly_ what they are and wants to set a trap for them.  The blueprints inside his jacket rustle traitorously. 

Tony _tsks,_ patting his shoulder.  “It’s okay, pumpkin,” he promises.  “I’m sure Barton’s out there right now, keeping an eye on things.”

This is probably true, and way more comforting than it could be.  The past two days have been pins and needles, waiting on tenderhooks for Loki to turn around and kill them.

(And he does kill, Steve’s seen it.  Just yesterday he knifed a man for bringing back the wrong kind of chicken.) 

So far, they’ve been able to avoid the man while watching him from a distance.  Steve would really like it to stay that way.

“Only a few more days,” Tony hums. 

Steve sighs. 

Natasha hisses for him to be quiet and he leans in again, curious, and catches the tail end of a conversation, a hurried, smooth goodbye, followed by a tentative _fader._

Nat freezes.

“What, what does that mean?”

She meets Steve’s eyes, vicious glee sparking in hers.  “ _Fader,_ Steve.  It means _father._ Loki just called that man—Laufey, he’s a crime boss too—his father.”

Steve blinks.  Wait, Odin isn’t Loki’s real father?  This tattooed weirdo is?  But he’s getting an idea now, a solid, real, plan that fits in with his dream levels, and Tony’s face splits into a wide, beaming grin. 

“Oh, we are so _in!_ ” he crows, right at the exact same moment as an arrow comes whistling through the window, burying itself into the wall behind them.

\----

They get Loki without much fuss. 

Nat lets Clint in through the window and the pair of them go out into the hotel, impossibly quiet.  Steve paces and Tony follows his every step doggedly, a for once silent hallucination, though he smells like sharp cologne. 

Ten minutes pass, then twenty, then nearly half an hour.  The blueprints rustle in Steve’s pockets, loud in the quiet room, and Tony chews at his lip. 

Finally, there are three knocks on his door, and he slips outside.  Clint’s shadow vanishes down the hallway. 

Steve gets out of the building without any problems, though he does step over one downed thug’s body.  He meets Natasha in the alley and hops into the back of a truck, crouching beside Clint and an unconscious Loki. 

“We got him,” Clint says grimly, wiping away blood.

“You’re hurt.”

“Not too bad.  Fucker’s a fast little shit, got me with one of his knives before we could get on top of him.”

Steve chews his lip for a second, but he nods.  “He sedated?”

“Out like a light.  Banner’s meeting us back at the plane, and we’ll have him off base before you know it.  You got the models?”

“I had to destroy them,” Steve explains. “He was on me, I couldn’t do anything but ditch them and run.”

“Shit, so we’re back to square one?”

Steve shakes his head.  “I made some blueprints.  They’re not as good as an actual model, but they’ll do.  I’ve got the rest up here.”  (Well, Tony has the rest, but Tony’s on Steve’s side.)

“Good.  Coulson’s got Thor and Bruce is ready with the somnacin.  We just need a plan.”

“Laufey is Loki’s father,” Steve says.

Clint stares. 

“Well, Loki called him that, anyway.”

“Huh.”  Clint looks thoughtful, rocking back on his heels.  “So Odin’s not the kid’s father?  Makes sense.  He doesn’t look much like Thor or Odin, you know?  Certainly explains why Odin never cared for the fucker.  I wouldn’t either, if I had to raise my enemy’s son.”

“So Odin’s wife slept with Laufey?”

“I guess.  We’ll have to ask Thor, when we get back.  I can’t believe Thor didn’t tell us.”

“Maybe he didn’t know.”

Clint snorts.  “Unlikely, but it could happen.  Maybe Odin didn’t want anyone to know.  He didn’t want to be associated with Loki, but I bet revealing that his wife slept with his rival would be worse than having a bastard son take over the empire.  They’re big on honor, these northern gangs.”

“Maybe we can use that,” Steve suggests.  “We know Loki feels like he’s got something to prove—to Odin, to Laufey, whatever—and he wants to be worthy of this empire, so we can play on that.  We can suggest that he _is_ worthy, but not of the crime part.”

“What if he wants Laufey’s approval, though?  Taking over the legit business would please Odin, but not the Frost Giant.”

Steve closes his eyes, trying to think.  “Odin raised Loki, though.  Laufey’s only been around him for a month or so while Odin had him his whole life.  Odin kept Loki, after all.  There’s gotta be something there.  Loki has to want his approval, his love.”

“We can try it, anyway,” Clint agrees.  “Christ, how did this get so complicated?  You told me it was gonna be an easy job.”

Steve shakes his head.  “I have no idea,” he mutters, as Natasha pulls out into the open and floors it, tires screeching.  “I really have no idea.”

\----

“Absolutely not,” Thor snarls, looming above Clint.  Steve takes a protective step forward.  “Loki is my brother!  He is not the son of Laufey, my father would have told me so!”

“I heard Loki call Laufey _father_ myself,” Natasha says, eyeing the blonde giant.  “Look, you signed up for this.  You told us to preform inception on your brother, which means we need to know—and will learn— _everything._ Some secrets were always going to come out.  This is just one of them.”

“Loki is not that beast’s child,” Thor spits.  “Loki is good, he is honorable, he is—”

“A very damaged, very scary individual,” Steve cuts in, stepping forward.  Thor _growls,_ shaking with fury. 

“You dare—”

“Mr. Odinsson, I’m not saying that Loki isn’t a good person, deep down, or implying that your family is somehow dishonorable.  I’m saying that he is Laufey’s son, and he’s just found out that the man who raised him lied to him for most of his life.”

Thor snaps something in Swedish, but he turns away, choosing to pace instead of pounding Steve into the concrete. 

On the lawn chair, Loki twitches, and Bruce goes over to check on him, shooting Thor wary glances out of the corners of his eyes. 

“We can use this,” Steve cajoles.  “Think about it.  If he thinks Odin doesn’t love him, we can _plant_ the idea that he does.  We can fix his relationship with your father, and turn him away from Laufey and the family business in the process.”

Thor barks a laugh.  “You mean to repair a decade of damage in one fell swoop?  He and our father have been at odds for years.”

“I know,” Clint says, taping his files.  “But inception is a powerful thing.  We can fix it.”

“How?”

The dreamers share a look.  They roughed out a plan in transit.  It’s wild, and more than a little risky, but it might— _might_ —work. 

Tony, sitting in the corner by himself, grins. 

“First level,” Steve says, rolling the blueprints out.  “A ruined city.  In this dream, we give Loki the idea that he’s won, he’s created a crime empire and he runs Stuttgart.  But it’s bad down there, it’s not what he imagined at all.  Natasha will forger Laufey and play it up like this is how it was supposed to be all along, then she’ll push Loki around a little bit, demand more from him.”

“Basically, I’ll create a division between Loki and Laufey.  He won’t trust Laufey at all, and he’ll think that his dreams of creating a bigger empire than Odin ever had will only lead to trouble.”

“And then?”

“Second level,” Steve says, rolling out the next one.  “A hospital.  Here we’ll send Loki to Odin—again, Nat in forge—who will tell your brother his dreams of his sons running the most successful legitimate business in the world.  He’ll tell Loki that he’s proud of him, and he will apologize for never telling Loki that he’s adopted.”

“And then?”  Thor asks, but he seems a little calmer now, listening intently.

“Third level.  A single building.  We’ll have you in this one, and we’ll need you to convince Loki you can’t do this alone.  You’ll have to tell him that you need him.”

“And then?”

Steve takes a deep breath.  “The fourth level.  Here we have to make it stick, all of it.”

“Basically, it’ll go like this,” Clint says.  “ _Laufey can’t be trusted, he only brings ruin_ ; _Odin will be proud of me if I go legit_ ; _my brother can’t do this on my own_ ; _I am the only one who can make a difference in Asgardian Enterprises._ ”

Thor strokes his beard thoughtfully, looking at his unconscious brother with tenderness.  “Seems simple enough,” he rumbles. 

“It does, doesn’t it?” 

Steve takes a deep breath, doesn’t meet Tony’s eyes.  “It’s now or never, Thor,” he says.  “The sooner we get started with dry runs, the sooner we bring your brother back.”

_There is a way back,_ he hears, and it sounds like Loki and Tony too, speaking together.  _There is a way to be good again._

He swallows.  “There is a way for him to be good again.”

“Very well,” Thor says, straightening.  “Your reasoning is sound.  What would you like me to do?”

Steve looks at Natasha, at Clint, at Bruce, at Coulson who watches everyone with sharp, calculating eyes.  He looks at Tony, who grins. 

“Bruce, fire up the PASIV for dry runs,” he says, steady, even.  “We’re going under.” 


	4. iv

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again :) I am a bit late with this because of reasons, but I'm rather happy with the way it turned out, so hopefully it's worth it. Thank you to everyone who's read, kudos'd (is that a verb? it should be a verb) and commented! You are all so lovely <3
> 
> A side note: this is rapidly showing signs of developing into a full-blown 'verse, with backstories and sequels and shit. Oh god. 
> 
> Also thank you to my new tumblr friends! It is wonderful to meet you all! 
> 
> Super-thanks to Leah for putting up with my terrible this chapter! You are wonderful, darling <33333
> 
> Onward!

shooting stars, falling objects

 

In their dreams, Tony built mazes with light. 

Great glittering mazes and small splendid ones, all glowing blue and red and yellow, a private lightshow for Tony and Tony alone.  They hung in the air, as real as pictures, and Tony brought up buildings with a wave of his hand and crumbled them with a flick of his fingers.  

Steve loved them. In reality, Tony was bound to cardboard and plaster, callous on his hands and glue flecking his hair.  But in dreams, the light was his.  It wound around his fingers, pulled together and apart for him, and he built with it, fantastic, shining dreams that they ran through, chasing each other up stairs like clouds and bridges the color of the northern lights.  When these dreams collapsed, they went to light, and Steve and Tony fell and fell without hitting the ground. 

They were beautiful dreams.  Tony’s always were, even the ugly ones, the ones with black and gray and Afghan caves yawning at every step, the ground littered with scraps of useless, broken metal.  The reason Tony was such a good architect was because his dreams didn’t go for reality—they didn’t go for Cobb’s gritty realism or the military’s stark lines.  Tony’s dreams were huge, over the top, stunning in their scope.  Tony’s dreams felt real because they were like life, complicated, messy, but elegant too, in ways you wouldn’t expect.

Steve misses them. 

He remembers, vividly, the sharpness of Tony’s buildings, the coolness of the metal.  The heat, and the light flashing off glass.  He remembers Tony with his arms outstretched, a city unfolding around him, a grin on his face.

He remembers, and takes a deep, shuddering breath. His dreams, by comparison, are shadows.  Clumsy, childlike.  He has the realism down right—his style has always been closer to Cobb’s—and he can build mazes, but still.  His dreams are just missing something.  A spark.  Light you can hold.  Tony. 

But Tony’s gone, isn’t he?  Steve knows this.  He remembers that too. 

He breathes again.  The taste of somnacin is heavy on his tongue, and high above there’s Dean Martin, crooning his own heartbreak. _Retorna me, cara mia ti amo…_

It’s time to go.  They have a job to do, in Steve’s shadowy dreams.  An idea to plant, a man to fix and bring back to his brother’s side. 

A way back.  A way to be good again.

Because if Steve does this, if he turns Loki away from blood and violence, then, well, doesn’t he cancel out the rest of it?  Doesn’t he make up for Pepper, for Peggy, for Erksine, for Tony?  If he plants this idea and it sticks, he’s saving thousands of lives Loki’s empire would destroy.  He’s making the world a better place.

Redemption, like the memories of Tony’s light-streaked dreams, dances behind his eyelids. 

“Oh baby,” Tony says like he does, curled warm and flush against Steve’s back. 

_Solo tu, solo tu, solo tu, solo tu…_

“Tony,” Steve says, his eyes screwed tightly shut.  He turns, rolling into Tony so he can fold him in his arms, pull him close, tight. Tony’s hair tickles his chin and there’s that sharp smell again, a bit like cologne, a bit like sweat, a whole lot like hot metal.  Is this how Tony really smelled?  Steve can’t remember, not anymore. 

“Mm?”

Steve tries to breathe.  He can’t, not right, not anymore.  “Don’t make me leave.”

“I told you before,” says Tony, and it’s a smile into Steve’s chest, a soft laugh vibrating down through skin and bone.  “Baby, I’m here to stay.”

_Solo tu, solo tu, solo tu, solo tu, mio cuore…_

\----

Natasha’s totem is an old brass bishop.  It wasn’t originally, but her old totem was compromised a long time ago, and she finds that she likes this one better.

They’re funny things, totems.  They can be anything.  Most people use ones that have weight to them, loaded die, spinning tops, chess pieces that fall just a certain way, things that feel heavy and real in pockets, that lie warm against heartbeats, that no one else knows and can take from them. 

Others use more unconventional things.  A pocket watch that only works in dreams, a wedding ring that disappears in reality.  A pair of dog tags, alternately smooth and engraved. 

Natasha likes hers, though.  Those unconventional totems are risky at best.  They don’t have any weight to them, any substance, and the mind is a powerful thing.  Getting turned around isn’t hard, not with a totem like that.  She should know. 

But a chess piece, that’s a good totem.  That’s a solid one, and she’s very, very grateful she decided to listen to Clint all those years ago, that she carved her own totem out of rusted brass.  She’ll never mix up reality and dreaming again, not with her bishop between her fingers, not even if she’s in Mombasa’s dark dens. 

She breathes a sigh.  “You think he’s up for this?”  Natasha asks, crossing her ankles.  She sits beside Clint in the warehouse and they watch Steve sleep.  The time on his PASIV is slowly running down, the dream trickling away. 

Clint shrugs, playing with his own totem, rolling it over and over in his fingers.  “Dunno,” he says.  “I thought he was, but now I’m not so sure.”

“You saw Tony,” she says. 

He nods.  “Yeah.”

Natasha sighs, rolling her shoulders.  “This is safe, right?  We’re not going to end up trapped in limbo over this?”

Clint shrugs again, his face unreadable.  “I don’t trust Odinsson.”

“Which one?”

“Either of them,” he murmurs, eyeing Thor.  The blonde watches his unconcious brother with mournful eyes.  _A pair of kings._ “There’s something Thor isn’t telling us.  I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it.  Loki’s not—”

“Yeah,” Natasha says, “I know.”  She stands up, stretching, her bishop clenched tight between her fingers.  “Can we handle it?”

“We have to, don’t we?”  Clint says.  He stands too, tucking his totem away.  “There’s no getting out of this one.  It’s our last chance.”

And it is their last chance, isn’t it?  The last chance to do some good in the world before dreamshare is shut down, before they’re caught (it’ll happen, one day), before they’re so messed up over the whole thing that reality just doesn’t cut it anymore.

(It’s already too late for Tasha.  Her reality is too dull, these days.  She would much rather dream, and that’s become a problem.  Soon, if she’s not careful, she’ll be compromised.)

It’s their last chance.  They can’t lose, not this one. 

“The great game,” Clint murmurs, standing over Steve as the time on his clock runs down.

Natasha smiles.  He’s always loved chess.  Sometimes she thinks the pieces on the board are easier for him to relate to than actual people. That’s how he sees them, she knows.  Clint and his team of chess pieces, dancing across the board.  When they first met, she was surprised when he called her his bishop.  She’d never been a bishop before.  Natasha the pawn, the Black Widow, the killer-for-hire, that’s what she’d been.

But Clint saw more, said, _brass bishop_.  Steve and Tony too, all of them, and they’re _hers_ now, her team, even though the queen’s out of play. 

 _Not for long, though,_ she thinks, remembering Tony in Steve’s dreams, slinking around at the edges of things, half shade and all teeth. 

She rolls her totem between her fingers, testing the weight.  Steve twitches.  His clock’s almost out.  “We better gear up, huh?”

Clint nods, standing.  “Might as well,” he says.  “We’ve got a hell of a job ahead of us.”

 “Inception’s never easy,” she murmurs, watching Steve’s clock. 

Ten, nine. 

“Good thing we’re prepared, yeah?” 

“Yeah,” Natasha says, thinking of Tony down below, pacing back and forth, watching everything behind his sunglasses.  _The wounded queen._

Seven, six. 

Across the room, Bruce straightens, adjusting his glasses.  She doesn’t know what his totem is, but she sees him go for it, just to check. 

“Ready?”  Clint calls.

Five, four.

“Ready!”  Bruce bellows back, grabbing the PASIV.  Coulson stands up, inscrutable as always. 

Three, two.

“Okay, places everybody,” Clint says, rolling his shoulders and jumping into a deep lunge.  “Showtime.”

One.

\----

Steve stretches, washing the taste of somnacin out of his mouth mechanically, even though he knows he’s going under in less than ten minutes.  He’s a creature of habit, and he _hates_ the taste of that stuff.  He’s never really gotten used to it. 

He swipes his thumb across his totem, feeling the smooth, cool metal, and heads back out of the cramped bathroom to join the rest of his team. 

The usual pre-job jitters have set in, though no one seems to want to talk about it.  Out of all of them only Coulson is relaxed, and he’s the only one going not going under. 

(A note about Phil Coulson: he never, ever, _ever_ goes under.  Steve is sure he can—he has to be a dreamer, there’s no way he’s not—but he doesn’t.  Not even Clint and Natasha can get him to dream, not that Steve’s seen.) 

Everyone else paces.  Even Thor, though he stays pretty close to his unconscious brother, weaves around the tangle of lawn chairs, his usually cheerful face set in a firm line.   “We are going into my brother’s dreams now, yes?”  he asks, forehead creased.  “No more tests, no more trials?”

(They’ve spent the past two days running nearly non-stop tests on the dreams, exploring each level, checking for any chinks in the design.  So far, everything is sound.  Thor’s been getting impatient.)

“No more tests,” Clint agrees.  “Everybody know the plan?” 

Steve looks around at his teammates, and he’s proud of them, he really is.  They’ve done _fantastic_ these last couple of days.  Inception isn’t a job to put a rush on but they’ve done it, and they’re ready to go.  He meets Coulson’s eyes across the room. 

Coulson blinks once, head tilted like he’s considering something, but then he nods.  He’s ready.  He’ll protect them, if it comes down to that.

So far, they’ve had Loki for over forty-eight hours and there’s been no sign of his henchmen, but both Loki and Laufey are powerful people, with deep pockets and long reaches.  Steve knows they don’t have much time before they’re eventually hunted down, and he’d rather be long gone by the time any thugs show up. 

(Their plan works a little like this: They kidnapped Loki and sent Laufey a ransom demand.  By this time tomorrow they’ll be in Portugal, a thousand miles away and holed up in a dusty motel, and Laufey will find his son.  Loki will be roughed up a little—Clint’s doing, because Steve had to physically restrain Thor—but otherwise unharmed.  This way, both Loki and Laufey won’t even think of dreamshare, and the inception will stick.)

“First level, _Laufey can’t be trusted, he only brings destruction._ Remember that,” Coulson says. 

Bruce, fiddling with the PASIV, looks up and nods once, his shaggy hair flopping.  “PASIV’s prepped.  We’re ready.”

“If things go south, don’t shoot me,” Natasha warns.  “I won’t drop the forge unless I have to.”

“You,” Steve says to Thor, “keep your head down.  Do what we told you, stay out of our way, and you’ll be fine.”

“We’re not getting shot over your ass.  It might be a dream but it still hurts like a mother,” Clint adds.  They still haven’t told Thor about the sedative, or the risk of dropping into limbo.  They won’t, unless they absolutely have to.

“I understand,” Thor rumbles, flopping into the lounge chair beside Loki.  “Are we going or not?”

Everyone shares a last, contemplative look.  Steve’s ready.  His totem’s a solid weight in his pocket.  Tony, his edges stark and real, grins from where he’s sitting on the steps alone, watching.  Natasha pulls her hair back—it’s longer than it’s been in a while.  Huh.  Steve’s never noticed that before. 

Coulson nods, and Bruce nods, and Clint slaps his hands together, stretching like a cat. 

“We’re good, Barton,” Natasha says, all business as she saunters over to Coulson and kisses him on the cheek.  “Fire it up.”

“Okay, places everybody.”

The team shuffles into the circle of chairs, choosing their favorites and settling down.  Steve winces, trying to get comfortable, and gives it up as a bad job after a few minutes.  He’s closest to Loki on the right, and on his left Nat settles in.  Clint picks the chair beside her, and then there’s Bruce and Thor on Loki’s other side. 

They’re ready.

“You know what to do,” Coulson says, passing out clean, shiny needles.  “Follow protocol.”  He’s referring to the kicks, telling them to watch the time, to be alert.  “Stay out of limbo.  Come back safe.”

Steve grins.  “You know we will.”

Coulson slaps his shoulder, then straightens, fingers on the PASIV.  “Ready?”

They exchange looks one last time, and Steve slides the needle into his wrist.  “Ready,” he says, and it’s echoed around the circle by everyone, even Thor. 

“Okay,” says Coulson, and he presses the button.  “See you topside.”

Steve closes his eyes, feeling the somnacin rush through his veins, and breathes.  Tony laughs softly. 

He sleeps.

\----

“Get up,” Clint says, kicking Steve in the shin.  “We have three minutes.”

Steve drops into his body suddenly, bolting upright and shaking himself, trying to get ready of the fog of Bruce’s sedative.  “Where are we?”

“Corner of the dream, third floor.  Right where we need to be.”  Clint’s doing stretches again, loosening all the muscles in his body.  He grabs the PASIV and a handgun, tossing the other to Steve.  (Usually Clint goes for his bow in dreams, but it’s a little out of place here when they’re playing generic mob thugs.) 

Steve checks his reflection in the mirror as he moves, catching a quick flash of blond, carefully combed hair, a pressed black suit, and a vivid green tie.  Clint’s dressed much the same.  Loki has a thing for green, then. 

They take a position on either side of a grimy, cracked window, checking outside every few seconds.  Outside is a wreck of a city, the buildings barely more than metal bones, bent and bowed down, scrapping their broken heads against a steely sky. 

“Nice touch,” Clint mutters, scanning the darkened clouds.  “Doom and gloom and all that shit.”

“Thanks,” Steve says.  “I try.”  (In the dirty glass he catches a flash of a reflection, a silver suit and a blinding grin.  He doesn’t turn around.) 

“Minute and a half.”

Down below in the streets, a sleek, rumbling car glides past, its windows black and vaguely threatening.  “There’s Tasha.”

Clint nods, counting down in his head.  A few more cars snarl past, their engines loud and ragged in the dream’s pre-storm quiet.  Projections, all in suits with sharp green ties, prowl after them, chewing on cigarettes, guns hanging loosely from their dirty, stained hands.  They don’t suspect anything, not yet.  The dream’s only just started.

“Go,” Clint says, once the last one is down the street and out of sight.  Steve obediently kicks the glass window, cracking it open wide.  The reflections vanish in a swirl of broken glass, and he and Clint are down the rusted fire escape and into the street before any projections come sniffing around.

They fall in line a little ways behind the other projections, making sure to keep their heads down.  Steve dreams up a pack of cigarettes in his pocket and lights one, pulling in the smoke.  He doesn’t smoke in reality so he has no idea what cigarette smoke tastes like, so he goes for a little hint of sweet, curling around his shoulders.

Clint doesn’t smoke, but he pulls his hat lower and shoves his hands deep in his pocket.

Steve can’t help but lean over and hiss, “we are a fucking _Godfather_ cliché,” which makes Clint choke on a laugh, and they follow the projections down the main street, in the shadow of a wasted city.

“Jesus, Steve, what did you do, watch a little too much _Batman_ as a kid?”

Steve grins sideways.  “Shut up.  I thought it fit.” 

Clint shakes his head, pulling his hat even lower and adjusting his tie.  “This better work.”

“I know.”

They fall into a rigid silence as they tag along, but they’re getting close to the center of it all now.  A huge, crooked building rises out of the tattered asphalt, the tip of it lost in the heavy clouds.  The neon lettering on top flickers and splutters, ASGARDIAN ENTERPRISES flickering on and off in a haphazard, staccato pattern.  Half the windows are blown out and the rest are caked with grime.

It looks pathetic. 

The horde of green-tied projections files inside the gaping door, following the cars, and Steve and Clint join them.  But while the rest of the projections, acting like the subconscious security they are ( _militarized,_ Steve has to remember, _they’re militarized, if they think something’s wrong they will_ attack), fan out and start getting lost in the maze, Clint and Steve head straight for the center of the building. 

Another hundred projections or so are all crammed into one room, watching the middle intently, and there’s Loki in an elegant suit, a green scarf flapping loosely in the chill breeze, and Laufey— _damn,_ Natasha looks terrifying—is striding through the gathered projections with a vicious grin on his tattooed face.

“She really goes all out, doesn’t she,” Steve mutters, and it isn’t a question.

Clint snorts. 

“ _Fader,_ ” Loki greets tentatively, head canted to the side.  “You came.”

“Of course I did,” Natasha booms, another sharp grin splitting the lines on her face.  “I brought you a gift, my son.”

At those words Loki seems to relax, his tension—confusion, probably—dropping away.  The projections relax also, not sensing anything wrong.  Natasha’s good.  “A gift?”

“To celebrate,” Laufey-Natasha elaborates, waving a great blue hand.  “You and yours have served me well, and never has either of our families had more power.  We have brought the Wanderer’s followers to his knees.  Everything he once held in such high esteem is now ours.”

“We defeated him,” Loki says wonderingly, and he’s accepting it, of course he is.  In dreams, anything is possible, and this is his greatest wish. 

Laufey laughs.  “Yes,” the Frost Giant says, “and I could not have done it without you, my son.”

Loki seems to glow, growing, if possible, even taller than he already is. 

“He really is starved,” Clint murmurs, more to himself.  Steve just watches.  He doesn’t have anything to do with this dream, not yet.  This is Natasha’s show. 

“Bring him,” Laufey barks, gesturing at a huddle of projections.  They obey, reaching inside the sleek black car, and drag Thor out by his hair.  Odin’s son, to his credit, doesn’t make a sound, though Steve knows it hurts. 

Bruce, masquerading as Laufey’s driver, steps out of the car and comes to stand by Tasha’s blue-inked side, his face impassive.  Thor is thrown at Loki’s feet.

Loki takes a step back, shock flaring across his face.  Even from the back of the room Steve can see his eyes, brilliant green and alarmed.  “What is this?” he asks, and his voice only wavers a little. 

Laufey grins again, yellowed teeth flashing.  “A gift,” Natasha purrs, pacing, circling Loki and the bound, silent Thor.  “Odin’s last great stronghold, Thor the good son, Thor the _noble_ son, Thor the dog who follows his master’s every command.”

“Where—” Loki starts, then stops.  He looks everywhere but Thor and Laufey’s eyes, and finds Steve in the crowd. 

Steve holds very still, waiting.

But Loki doesn’t seem angry to see him there, and the projections don’t turn on them immediately.  Rather, _relief_ flickers across Loki’s features before he stamps it out, and he raises a hand. 

“Go,” Clint mutters. 

Steve does.  The crowd of suited projections parts for him, and he brushes against them as he goes to Loki’s side.

“Sir,” he says, standing at attention.

“Who is this?” Natasha growls, still circling. 

“A friend,” Loki replies, calm once more.  “A loyal soldier.”

Steve doesn’t say anything, and at his feet Thor stirs, groaning quietly.

“Brother,” he whispers, just like he was told to.  “Brother, please—”

“Silence,” Laufey snarls, pacing in again, too close.  “This is my gift to you, my son.  Your so-called brother, the one you have hated and despised all these years, the one Odin loved _more_ than you.”

“What is the meaning of this?” Loki asks evenly, meeting Natasha’s fevered eyes for the first time.  “Did you kidnap him?”

“Of course,” Natasha laughs.  “Though there was no one there to stop me.  Your brother has no one left now, Loki.  Now he is the abandoned one.  Now he is alone.”

Loki’s eyes flicker.  _Something_ glows inside of them, bright and ugly, before it’s hidden again. 

“We have brought Europe to its knees,” Laufey continues, circling, always circling.  Steve breathes, and lets himself be still.  “This is everything you have ever wanted, my son, and I’ve given it to you and more.”

“What would you have me do?”  Loki says, his hands spread wide. 

Laufey’s tattooed face falls into something deep and vicious.  “Kill him,” he rumbles.

Thor makes an outraged—the man is a good actor, Steve will give him that—and thrashes against his cuffs, struggling to rise.

Steve, aware that Loki is watching his every move, plants a foot on Thor’s back and presses down, forcing him back. 

“Kill him,” Loki repeats.

“But of course.  What better way to reward yourself than to remove the stain of Odin from you entirely?  This _boy_ is all that’s left of the old fool.”

“I am left,” Loki says, more a whisper than anything. 

Laufey laughs.  “Come, child,” he thunders, and leads Loki out of the dense room.  Loki hesitates, then motions for Steve to follow.  He’s just looking for a familiar face, of course, and he recognizes Steve, knows subconsciously that he’s a hired killer, but the sheer relief on his face when Steve follows almost hurts. 

Loki is out of his depth, and he knows it.  This is good.  This means that the dream is doing its job. 

Steve follows, keeping a respectful distance.  The building, a miniature maze within itself, curves around and goes nowhere, but Natasha stops by a cracked window and points outside. 

“Look,” she says in Laufey’s rumble.  “This is what we have done.” 

Loki stares outside, and Steve can only imagine what he’s feeling.  There is _nothing_ out there.  The buildings are bowed and empty.  There are people—projections—on the street, but the ones who aren’t wearing black suits and green ties are ragged, dirty things, cowering in the shadows and lying curled against piles of rubble.  They have grasping hands.

Somewhere in the distance, there’s a thunderous boom, and dirty smoke spills into the air.  Orange firelight flares, and then spreads.  A very faint screaming starts. 

Loki flinches back.  “There’s nothing out there,” he says, and when he turns to Laufey again his green eyes are bright with mistrust. 

Natasha laughs.  “Of course there is.  You must look harder, my son.  There are your men, and the fear and respect they command.  There are our loyal subjects, groveling, desperate for our favor.  You are a king here, child.”

“A king,” Loki murmurs.  “I’ve always wanted to be a king.”

“And you cannot be one if Thor lives,” Laufey says quickly.

“Why not?”

“Because,” Laufey rumbles, then falters, just like they planned.  “Because he is Odin’s son.”

“And I have already defeated Odin, you said so yourself!” Loki says, stepping forward.  “Odin is but a memory here.  They call me a king, you say?  Then Thor is already finished!  He does not need _death_ to end him, his time is already over.”

“You will do as I say,” Laufey snarls, taking another step forward, looming over Loki.  “I have given you everything!”

“I have earned everything myself!” Loki spits, angry now, that crazy hunger gleaming in his eyes.  “Where were you when I was young, _father?_ Where were you when I was alone?  You only came after I sent to for you!  What have you given me?”

“The world!” Laufey roars, throwing a blue arm out at the wasted city beyond the glass.  “I made you a king!”

“A king of what!” Loki bellows back, toe to toe with the Frost Giant.  “There is _nothing out there_!  Everything is ruined!”

“Everything is as it should be,” Natasha says. 

“No it’s not!  I was supposed to be loved by the world, not feared!  Not despised!  Look at them, they’re pathetic!”  Loki’s eyes are wild and wounded, and Steve can see just _how_ he’s held on to power this long.  Even in madness he’s strangely magnetic, strangely sympathetic.  He talks, and you want to listen. 

But Natasha was a spy.  She’s heard sweet words and desperate pleas before, and even Loki’s special brand of smooth words doesn’t affect her.  She laughs, long, loud, and with too much teeth, and claps a heavy hand on Loki’s shoulder.

“This is how it should be,” she whispers, intimate, a father sharing a secret with a son.  “This is how it always is.”

Loki draws back, tries to pull free.  “It’s not how I wanted it!” he snaps, desperate now.  “I wanted Odin and Thor alive, so they can see me, so they’ll have to, to—”

“To what, child?  This is how it always is.  Did you expect anything different?”

“TO LOOK AT ME,” Loki roars, and Steve’s moving before he can even register what’s happening, slamming into a seven-foot Natasha and knocking her back through the glass. 

It gives under their combined weight and they fall, Steve landing on top of blue skin.  Natasha hisses a “ _what the fuck, Steve?_ ” before he breathes, “ _Shawarma_ ” and stands up, shaking away the glass.

“Stay back, sir,” he says warningly, spreading his arms out to keep Loki at bay.

Natasha, bless her and her assassin’s brain, plays dead.  This is an excellent thing, because Loki is holding a long, sharp knife, and its edge is already slick with blood. 

“Why did you do that?” Loki says, sounding almost startled. 

“He was about to attack you, sir,” Steve says seriously, backing up and forcing Loki with him.  Natasha doesn’t move.  “I’m supposed to protect you.”

Loki stares at him, unblinking.  Steve is painfully aware of the knife, and the feeling of _sharp_ intensifies, spilling from Laufey’s son with almost unbridled intent. 

“Are you okay?” Steve asks. 

Loki blinks, and the feeling fades.  “I—yes.  I’m fine.  He didn’t hurt me.”

“You sure, sir?”

“Very,” Loki murmurs.  He looks at the fallen Frost Giant and the wasteland one last time, and then turns away.  “Come,” he says.  “We have to go.  Laufey’s people will be here soon.”

“Sir?”

“We have to leave.”

“But he’s your father,” Steve says, just to check.  He’s pretty sure they got the idea across this level, but he has to be sure. 

Loki’s eyes flicker.  They’re dark, almost emerald in the shadows, but he doesn’t attack Steve or go back for Laufey.  “I spent twenty-four years without a father,” he murmurs.  “I hardly need one now.”

Steve doesn’t say anything—he has nothing to say.  They’ve done their work here on this level with time to spare.  Now he just has to get Loki from here to the drop point, and they can go down another level.

Some tiny part of Steve is concerned.  So far Loki’s been a model of sanity, perfectly rational even when faced with the seven-foot Frost Giant.  Where is the madness he’s come to expect, the knifing of minions, the violent outbursts? 

But Steve’s not going to be picky. There’ll be enough of that later, he’s sure of it.  For now he should just be glad he doesn’t have to work about Loki killing his teammates in a fit or anything.

Together they reenter the big room, and one of the suited thugs blinks, looks Loki up and down.  “Where's Mr. Laufey?” he rasps.

Loki offers him a sharp smile.  “Mr. Laufey will be along shortly,” he _purrs,_ and instantly every projection in the room goes relaxed.  Steve has to fight it himself, Loki’s willpower is that strong, that palpable. 

“Sir,” Steve says, “we should go.  Mr. Laufey will meet us later.”

“Yes,” Loki says.  “Yes, of course.  You and you, grab him.  We’re leaving.”  Clint and a faceless projection grab Thor and haul him, still struggling, back into the car.  Bruce climbs back into the driver’s seat and Natasha appears from the hallway, her forge gone, to slip in beside Steve as he closes the door.

“Sir,” she tells Loki, nodding respectfully.  “The situation has been handled.”

“Ah.”  Loki looks to Steve.  “Laufey will not follow us?”

“He probably will,” Steve warns.  “He’s a determined one, and he doesn’t take kindly to disrespect.”

“Disrespect,” Loki spits, glaring down at Thor.  “What does the mighty Frost Giant know of disrespect?” 

Steve shrugs.  “I wouldn’t know, sir.”

“Where to?”  Bruce asks, peering at them through the mirror. 

“479 West Broad,” Natasha says immediately.  “Your safe house, sir.  I assume you never told Laufey about it?”

“No, never,” Loki says, falling into it.  It’s these little lies and concessions that make dreamshare _work._ Reality is so fluid in a dream, so easy to bend and accept.  All they have to do is offer the idea, say _this is your safe house,_ or _I am your friend,_ or _you just have to trust us, sir,_ and it is. 

It’s dangerous, but at the same time, well.  There’s a reason Steve didn’t quit after Berlin. 

“Very well,” says Bruce, and they drive quickly but not too fast, taking their time.  They’ve got whole hours left before the somnacin runs out, plenty of time up here and even more deeper down.  There’s no sense in rushing inception.

“Why did Laufey bring me Thor?” Loki asks suddenly, meeting Steve’s eyes.  His own are too bright.  “Why my brother?  My quarrel is not with him.”

Steve shrugs, sharing a look with Natasha.  “I dunno, sir.  It’s not my job to ask why.”

“But you’re smart,” Loki persists.  “There’s something in your head, anyway.  Why would he do this?  I have helped him, I have been a good son, why would he want me to kill my brother—”

“It’s not you,” Natasha says, leaning deep into the shadows.  Her skin flickers to Steve’s eyes, grows just a shade bluer.  “It’s Odin.”

“Come again?”  Loki frowns now, eyes glittering.

“It was never you.  This deal you’ve made with Laufey, what was it for?  Not for you, certainly.  Laufey’s known you were alive.  He just never cared enough to look for you, until you reached out.  He doesn’t want _you,_ he wants to hurt Odin.”

Loki draws back, a wounded snarl on his face.  The car sways, and in the distance those growling engines start up, drifting closer.  The projections.  “Odin is _nothing,_ ” he snarls.  “I have proved that.  I’ve put together a greater empire than he ever did—”

“With Laufey’s help,” Steve points out.  “Sir.”

“Laufey was only a tool,” Loki snarls.  “I never felt—”

“Like he was your father?”  Steve keeps his eyes and face as gentle and honest as he can.  It’s not hard.  Tony always said he just looked _trustworthy._

Loki curls in on himself, shoulders hunched defensively.  “Yes,” he mutters.  “Like that.” 

“Having Odin’s youngest son kill his oldest would break the old man,” Natasha continues, as if Steve and Loki hadn’t interrupted her at all.  “Laufey would win, once and for all.  It was never you.”

“ _You_ were the pawn,” Clint cuts in, eyes hidden beneath his hat.  “No offense, sir.”

“None taken,” Loki says, his voice knife-edged.  “It’s nothing new after all, is it, Thor?”  A sudden viciousness disfigures Loki’s face and he lunges, half falling across the car to get at his helpless brother.

“ _Don’t,”_ Steve hisses, grabbing the younger man’s broad shoulders and hauling him back.  The dream seems to waver for a moment, growing terribly hot, but Loki lets himself be pulled away.  “You don’t want to prove Laufey right, sir.”

“No,” Loki pants, and _there’s_ the wildness, hard and gleaming.  “Perhaps not.”

Steve eyes Thor, who looks up at his brother with huge, liquid eyes.  “Brother,” he says, tenderly.  “Brother, this is not the way.”

“Shut up,” Clint says lazily, kicking Thor.  “I don’t think anybody wants to hear you talk.”

Behind them, the roar of other cars is getting closer.  Damn.  Steve should’ve known better, should’ve known that they couldn’t trick the projections for long.  They’ll be realizing it’s a maze now, and it doesn’t help that Loki’s so riled up. 

“Might want to drive a little faster,” Steve says, nudging Bruce’s chair.  The chemist meets his eyes.

“Sure thing,” he says, and speeds up, tearing down the faded roads.  “We’re getting close now.”

“Just hurry.  I don’t think Laufey is too happy.”

They’re about half a block from the drop point when gunfire slices into the side of the car.  Glass shatters and metal crumples, and Natasha bellows “ _get DOWN!_ ” as Steve lunges and drags Loki to the floor of the car, out of the way. 

Clint swears violently, pressed on top of Steve, and through the splatter of gunfire and the screech of bending metal, Steve hears Bruce yelling frantically, and then the car flips—

The bottom drops out of Steve’s stomach and for a second they’re suspended, caught in limbo, and then they come crashing down.  Metal screams and fire laces up Steve’s leg, but he’s alive, he’s okay, and he hauls Loki from the wreckage while reaching for Clint. 

“ _Shit,_ ” he says, scanning the ragged skyline frantically, searching for their attacker.  “There!   Fourth floor, building across the street!”

Natasha unloads a clip into the window, blood trickling down her face.  The gunfire stops, but the damage is done. 

“We good?”  Steve shouts.

“I’m not hit,” Clint rasps.  “Little banged up, though.”

“Same,” says Tasha.  “Bruce?”

“Ow,” Bruce says, dragging himself loose.  “Not shot, but _ow._ ”

“Loki’s unconscious,” Steve says, shaking the man.  Loki’s head lolls.  “Well, makes our job easier.”

“ _Thor,_ ” Clint and Natasha say at the same time, and dive back into the shredded car, each grabbing an arm and pulling.

Thor comes free with a pained growl and thumps his head back on the pavement, swearing low and insistent in Swedish. 

“Are you hurt?”  Steve asks, dropping Loki to check on him, flicking over Thor’s body.  Bloodstains grow across his torso, but there are no bullet holes, only shallow glass wounds. 

“I am fine,” Thor snaps, staggering to his feet.  “Though I would appreciate it if we did not repeat that.”

“Not anytime soon, anyway,” Steve says, hauling Loki up.  “The projections caught on.  They’re militarized and on the hunt.  We have to move.”

“How much of the maze do you think they know?”  Natasha asks.  “We didn’t exactly spell out the whole thing for them, but they know 479 West Broad.”

“It’s a good thing that’s not the drop point,” Steve says.  They’re standing in the shadow of 479 West Broad, and it’s probably the nicest damn building in the whole city, sleek, high-tech, and most definitely heavily secured.

The projections are going to have a hell of a time trying to break in there.  Steve almost feels bad for them, but they did just shoot him up.

“C’mon,” he says.  “Let’s get moving before more show up.”

Clint takes point, leading them through a miniature maze of alleys and back roads.  Steve and Thor support Loki, holding him up, and Natasha and Bruce cover the back, keeping wary eyes out.

They make it to the drop four blocks away without any trouble.  They won’t be found anytime soon. 

“Did it work?”  Thor asks, helping Steve drag his brother into an old apartment complex elevator.  “Does he mistrust Laufey?”

“I’ll say,” Natasha mutters.  “He went after me with a knife.”

“He doesn’t mean it,” Thor says apologetically.  Nat smiles at him. 

“Believe me,” she says.  “He did.”

“So it worked?  We got him this level?”  Clint asks, stepping off the elevator to sweep their room. 

“Looks like it,” Steve mutters, dropping Loki and moving towards the window, reaching for the blinds.  He looks down into the street and his heart plunges.  Tony’s down there, his suit black and cut to him, and he tilts his head up and waves at Steve, grinning sunnily.  Steve closes the blinds.

“What’s the matter, big guy?” Clint asks, looking up from the PASIV.  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“It’s nothing,” Steve mutters.  “I’m just ready to get this over with, is all.” 

Steve misses the look Natasha and Clint share, but he doesn’t miss the one he gets from Bruce.  He grins, trying to play it off.  “Are we ready to go or what?”

Guns crack in the distance, loud and sharp. 

“Be right back.  I’m going to set the charges,” Clint says, and disappears back down the elevator.  That’ll be the kick for this level.  They’re on the top floor of a very old apartment building.  The only way in is through the elevator, which Bruce will disable as soon as they’re under.  When the timers run out, bombs will go off down below, and the whole thing will come crashing down. 

A ready-made kick, just for them.  _Should go down smoothly,_ Steve thinks.  He paces, back and forth.

“Steve,” Natasha says.  “You should sit down.  Rest for a minute.  It’s only going to get harder from here.  It’s one thing to convince a paranoid mobster his allies are really enemies.  It’s another thing entirely to convince him that his father, who neglected him his whole life, really does love him.”

“She has a point,” Thor rumbles, looking down at his unconscious brother.  “I always thought our father wise, but now…  Now I see that he has hurt Loki, and Loki carries those hurts deep.”

“Fathers can do that to their kids,” Bruce shrugs.  Natasha nods, agreeing.  If Tony were here, he’d agree too.  Steve just shrugs, trying not to think about it.  He has other things to worry about. 

Finally, Clint comes back, wiping grease off his fingers.  “Charges are set,” he says.  “I have the timer set for half an hour.  That should be enough.  If we come up early or if it gets too ugly, you’ve got a detonator, Bruce.”

They avoid the word kick.  Bruce nods.  “We’ll be fine,” he says.  “I can handle a couple of projections.”

“Atta boy,” Clint laughs.  “Okay, guys, we ready?”

“I am,” Steve says.  He itches to get on with it, actually, right between his shoulder blades.  He feels Tony down there on the streets and he doesn’t like it, not one bit. 

“Let’s go,” Natasha says.  “We’re wasting time.”

“See you in half an hour,” Bruce says, hooking them up.  “Sweet dreams.”

“Yeah,” says Steve, thinking of Loki and that hard, glittering look in his eyes, and of Tony down there, following them.  “Right.”

Bruce smiles.  “Worth a shot, wasn’t it?”  He presses the PASIV, and somnacin rushes over Steve, darkening the edges of his vision. 

Tony’s there all of a sudden, running a thumb down Steve’s cheek.  “Sleep,” he says, and Steve does. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, I have just found out that my beta Leah won't be able to help out the next few weeks, as she is on a much-deserved vacation. Would anyone be kind enough to help out? Thanks!


	5. v

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hey, sorry for the wait! The storms in the American Midwest knocked out my power for a good few days. Sorry about that! 
> 
> Thank you to themallionaires for offering to beta!

shooting stars, falling objects

 

Bruce Banner isn’t entirely sure how he ended up with these people.  Dreamshare wasn’t even his thing not too long ago, and he’s at a loss as to how he ended up chemist for a bunch of half-crazy dreamers. 

Well, that’s a lie.  He knows _exactly_ how he ended up here.  (It involves a too-smart-for-his-own-good chemistry professor, an ungodly amount of alcohol, some anger management issues (he’s working on those, shut up), and Tony Stark.) 

He doesn’t regret it, not really.  Where he was before was a bad place, and this, this is good.  Weird, absolutely.  Dangerous, yes.  Completely batshit _insane,_ sometimes.  But it’s good. 

(Besides, if dreamshare doesn’t work out Steve seems to be fairly confident that Bruce could put all of Colombia out of the drug business in less than a day.  Bruce is pretty sure becoming a drug kingpin isn’t his thing, but it doesn’t hurt to keep his options open.)

Bruce is good at what he does.  Making compounds, creating new strains of somnacin, sharpening it, refining it, bringing everything to that pinpoint of perfection.  He’s very, very good at that. 

The rest of it, not so much.  He’s not military like Steve and Clint were, he’s sure as hell not whatever Natasha is (right now his money is on alien, but the jury’s still out), and he never had Tony’s particularly vicious streak when backed into a corner.  Yeah, when he gets angry he can fuck things up, and he knows which end of a gun is the dangerous one, but that’s about it.

So, in hindsight, it _will not be his fault_ if (when) this goes to shit. 

Really, he thought it would take them longer than this to sniff them out.  Projections, even militarized ones, have to work out the maze, so either Loki’s smarter than they thought or Steve’s maze is shit. 

Bruce watches them mass in the streets below and has to say it’s a little of both. 

It’s only been ten minutes.  There’s still twenty on the clock before he can even think about kicking out, and he really, really, _really_ doesn’t want to have to slog his way through limbo just yet, which leaves him with very few options. 

He can either a), fight like hell and hope to distract them long enough to live through this ( _really bad idea_ ), or b) outsmart them.  Since he’s dealing with an entire subconscious and not just one person, this is also a really, very bad, Tony Stark worthy idea, and Bruce isn’t Tony Stark, thank you very much.  He likes to think (well, pretend) that he’s a little more sane.

But, well.  He’s the chemist for a bunch of internationally-hunted dream thieves.  He has more money than he knows what to do with, more traumas than he’d care to think about, and he spends more time dreaming than awake.  _Sane_ doesn’t really come into the picture, now does it?

Bruce looks down at the seething, snarling mass of projections, and oh shit, that one’s got a grenade launcher.

_You better have thought of this, Steve,_ Bruce thinks, pulling back.  He looks behind him, at the six sleeping people he has to protect for twenty more minutes.  He can do this.  He has to do this. They have to make it out of here.

_Option two, then,_ Bruce thinks, cracking his knuckles and he starts dreaming himself a bridge.  _Outsmart them._

He almost smiles.  _Should be fun._

\----

Steve opens his eyes and he’s standing in an elevator, and Clint is looking at him disapprovingly. 

“What?” Steve asks.

“Nice scrubs, man.”

Steve looks down and flushes.  He’s wearing hospital scrubs with little clown faces on them, bright pink and red and green.  “Oh, yeah.  I forgot that you hate clowns.”

“You did that on purpose, didn’t you.”

“Not my dream,” Steve points out, grinning.  Clint is wearing a similar set, though his clowns are smiling wildly.  It’s actually terrifying. 

“Natasha,” Clint mutters.

“Natasha.”

The elevator _pings_ to a stop and they exit together, stepping into the bright (but faintly decayed, that’s an important touch) hallway.  These projections haven’t caught on yet, and they’re doctors, nurses, patients, scattered throughout this hospital that doesn’t really end. 

Steve does his best to blend in, loudly discussing children in the ER with scraped knees and runny noses, panicked mothers and overbearing fathers.  Clint nods when he’s supposed to and swipes coffee (tasteless, if his grimace is anything to go by) off a counter, and they pass without any problems. 

“Where’s Nat?”

“Forth floor, room seventy-nine,” Steve rattles off.  That’s where Thor will bring Loki, and Nat will be waiting in forge.  “We’ve got about five minutes.”

“Probably should take a look around then,” Clint says.  He pauses, cutting Steve a sharp, calculating glance.  “You can take care of yourself for two minutes, right?”

Steve laughs, waves him off.  “Of course.  Go do your thing.”

Clint nods once (in this light he looks surprisingly _old._ When did he get those worry lines?), and vanishes down the hallway.

Steve leans back against the counter, sipping his own cup of tasteless coffee, and watches the projections.  It stings a little that Clint has to ask if he’s alright by himself like he’s some kind of unruly toddler, but he can swallow it. 

It’s almost over.  They did the first level perfectly.  They’ve got Loki where they want him, and that’s what matters. 

“Hello, handsome,” Tony purrs, materializing from the crowd of white coats, a clipboard tucked under his arm.  Steve winces.  “The clowns are a nice touch.  Natasha’s work?”

“Natasha’s work,” Steve says, because he can’t think of anything else to say. 

Tony laughs, careless and easy and with too much force.  People are starting to stare. 

“What do you want, Tony?” Steve says through gritted teeth, turning so Tony’s shielded from the projections and their wary eyes.  “Why are you here?”

“We’ve been over this, big fella,” Tony laughs, eyes sparkling.  “You know why.”

“Shades are persistent projections that follow the dreamer, a mark of his subconscious that he cannot ignore or leave behind,” Steve rattles off, his tone dry, clinical.  “They are usually harmless and can be anything from a person to an object to a beloved pet.”

“Ouch.  That hurts, Steve,” Tony says, slapping a hand over his heart. 

Steve glares.  (The rest of that little tidbit goes something like this: _shades are usually harmless, but there have been documented cases of extreme violence, both physical and psychological.  The longer a dreamer carries a shade, the more dangerous the shade becomes._ )

“Keep on keepin’ on, honeybun,” Tony hums.  “I’ll see you around.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

“First you don’t want me here,” Tony calls over his shoulder, slipping back into the mass of projections, “then you don’t want me to go!  Make up your mind, Rogers, before someone makes it for you!”

And then he’s gone.

For a second Steve can’t move, frozen in place as the projections turn suspicious eyes on him, the force of their paranoia sharp, crippling. 

“Doctor,” Clint says, pushing his way through the crowd.  “Hey, Doctor!”

It takes Steve longer than it should to look up, but he does, and waves. 

“You’re needed in the ER,” Clint says loudly, all business.  “There’s a kid who fell out of a tree, he’s got a couple of broken bones and he needs stiches—”

“Of course.  Lead the way.”  Steve plays along, letting Clint badger him with made-up details.  It’s a thin cover, but its’ enough to convince the projections for now.  “How bad is it?” he mutters out of the corner of his mouth.

“We got hostiles coming in from the west.  These projections are getting pretty antsy too.”

“Do you think Loki suspects?”

“His subconscious sure does.”  Clint’s face is serious, but not panicked.  Still, projections catching on are never a good thing, particularly militarized ones in an unstable mind. 

Steve pushes all thoughts of Tony out of his head forcefully, focusing on the task at hand.  He can’t afford to be distracted.  He has to _focus,_ so they can pull this off. 

“What do you need me to do?” he asks.

Clint cuts him a thoughtful glance, head canted.  “Take a look for yourself,” he says.   “Maybe you can think up a way out of this.  We’ve still got two minutes before Loki gets to Tasha.”

Steve nods, stepping up to one of the largest windows (still pathetically small, as this level was designed to be claustrophobic and dark and almost completely without outside light) and peering out. 

There is a horde coming towards the hospital. 

There’s no other word for it, it’s a _horde._ A mass of blue-tattooed, snarling, gun-toting projections, led by none other than Laufey the Frost Giant.

“Well,” Clint says cheerfully, “at least we know that part stuck.  Laufey’s the enemy now.”

Steve shrugs, scrambling to think of a way out of this.  Yes, it’s great that Loki’s projecting Laufey as an enemy now, really, it’s fantastic, but now projection-Laufey has an army of vicious-looking mini-Laufeys, and Steve is just one person.  He has _no idea_ what to do, except get the hell out of dodge and that’s not really an option right now.

_Don’t panic,_ he tells himself, forcing battle-calm down his chest.  He’s been in worse situations.   ( _Hot light and sand and Bucky, bombs that burned everything to white-lit glass._ He sees a flash of light reflected in the window.  The dream whimpers.)

“We’ll need to stall them,” he says. 

Clint nods.  “Great idea, big guy.  Any idea as to how?” 

“Um.”

“Thought so.”

They’re getting closer now, storming across the empty space between the edges of the dream and the hospital.

Steve doesn’t see a way out of this.  If he creates something, a wall, a barbed-wire fence, anything, the projections in the hospital will catch on and then they’ll definitely be screwed, trapped with an army of rabid doctors.  They won’t last five minutes, and end up scrambled eggs down in limbo. 

Steve licks his lips.  “I can give you some time,” he starts to say, almost says, but he can’t quite get the words out.  There’s no way out but there _has_ to be—

_Think like Tony.  There’s always an out.  There’s always a way to cut the wire.  There’s_ —

(In the window he catches a reflection, a flash of a half remembered dream.  His dog tags weigh heavy in his pocket.

“ _See?” Tony says, eyes closed, arms outstretched, light playing over his fingers.  “You just have to feel it._ ”)

“Organic creation,” Steve says suddenly.

“What?”

“Remember?  Organic creation, I showed you before—”

“Made me jump off fucking stairs, you mean—”

“—and it should work here, we just have to get it just right.”  Steve can make this work.  He’s good under pressure, all he needs to do is focus a little.  He  can do this. 

“Go for it, Cap,” Clint says, eyeing the approaching horde.  “You’ve got a better feel for it than I do.  I’d rather not fuck it up.”

“Okay,” Steve murmurs, closing his eyes.  He carefully feels out the fabric of the dream, gathering the threads in his hands.  He’s not the dreamer—that’s Natasha—but that doesn’t mean he can’t change the dream if he has to.  Gently, he has to remember, gently.  He can’t startle the projections or let them catch on. 

He concentrates.  Intention swims behind his eyes, boiling and potent, and he thinks _we need to be protected_ with all his might—

(A memory, in reflected glass: _“Oh baby,” Tony says, head thrown back in a laugh, teeth flashing.  Steve grabs him, spins him around, grinning so widely he feels like his face is going to crack.  “You never could dance.”_

_“I can try, though,” Steve laughs, and pulls Tony into a clumsy waltz, both of them laughing as Dean Martin croons over the radio, tripping over their own two feet, singing along at the top of their lungs._

Retorna me…)

“ _Steve,_ ” Clint snaps, and Steve’s eyes fly open and the fabric slips, a ragged barbed-wire wall that doesn’t fit at all starting to punch its way through the earth.  “Focus!”

“I’m trying!” He tries again, remembering that he can’t force it, it has to grow naturally, if he forces it, everything will go wrong—

The dream shudders, hot and bright.  Steve breathes.

“Better,” Clint says, sounding relieved, and Steve risks a look outside.  There’s a wall, sure enough, but this time it looks like it’s just part of the hospital, dingy, gray, and faintly decayed-looking.  The barbed wire has turned to long strands of unbloomed ivy, wound deep into the concrete.  It won’t last, not for long, but it’ll do. 

“What the hell happened?  You lost it, for a second.”

“Nothing happened,” Steve says through gritted teeth, turning from the window.  Laufey and the militarized projections are dealt with for now, and the ones in the hospital, while twitchy, haven’t caught on.  (It was close, though.  Much, much too close.)  “I just slipped for a second.”

Clint makes a noncommittal noise, checking his watch.  “We’ve got a minute.  We need to go.”

Steve nods and lets Clint take him through the labyrinth.  Outside, the projections’ roar is muted by the wall.  He tries not to look out of any windows as he passes them, and keeps his eyes straight ahead. Focused. 

He doesn’t think about Tony or dancing or Dean Martin. 

Room 479 isn’t all that impressive, considering who’s in it, but it is a little bigger than the other rooms, and there’s a wide, open bay window overlooking a garden to put Loki at ease.

Natasha’s already in forge, wheezing on the bed.  Her skin is wrinkled and stretched, her hair a wild, wispy white.  She has a thick beard and an eyepatch.  Scars wind up her arms and her face. 

Odin the Wanderer looks terrifying. 

“It’s no wonder Loki’s messed up,” Steve mutters, trying to lighten the mood.  “Could you imagine eating breakfast with _that_ every morning?”

Clint huffs a laugh, lips quirking.  “You good, Nat?”

Odin, his good eye closed, barely nods.

“Alright, everything’s square here.  C’mon.  Thor and Loki will be here soon.” 

Together Clint and Steve slip through a series of connecting doors, winding their way in a tight square across the hospital.  Here at the center of the maze they’re just a hundred yards directly across from Natasha’s room.  They can see in, but Loki won’t be able to see them.

“The window’s open, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, opening the window in their room.  “We’ve got a path.”

Steve turns, fiddling with a baby monitor—low-tech, but unobtrusive in a hospital—and sound crackles to life, Odin’s steady wheeze, the thud of footsteps, and the creak of a door opening and closing.  More footsteps, and then Loki’s tentative, stiff voice, “ _Father?_ ”

Odin wheezes and Thor rumbles, speaking low to his brother. 

“Got him,” Clint murmurs.  He’s dreamed himself his bow and it’s drawn back, arrow point sharp and gleaming.  If this goes wrong, he’ll shoot Loki between the eyes and it’ll be over. 

“ _Thor,_ ” Odin says weakly.  “ _Loki.  My sons._ ”

Downstairs, there’s a thud and a rumble, almost like a growl. 

“Check that, will you?” Clint says.  “It’ll be the projections.”

Steve can see them moving through windows, flashes of white doctor’s coats and pink scrubs.  They’re searching the hospital room by room.  The paranoia has kicked in, and they’re hunting dreamers.  Shit.

“I’ll stop them, if I can.”

“Ten minutes, big guy.  Then we’re going under.” 

Steve nods, slipping out the door and back into the labyrinth.  He’s careful to lock the door behind him, and he sets off, moving quietly.  The projections haven’t started up here yet.  They’re still floors down, checking the ground floor before they come up.

But they know the number 479.  They’ll find it before ten minutes are up, but Steve’s smarter than a pack of projections.  He grabs the number plate on Odin’s door, switching the seven for another nine. 

It will buy them some time, at least. 

Next to go are the elevators.  They were designed to be easily destroyed, and Steve takes them all down with only a little extra dreaming.  The stairs are harder to deal with, but they’re Penrose loops.  Nothing will get up here unless they realize it’s a trick.  Steve guesses they’ll figure it out eventually, but for now, it’ll hold.

“Everything ship shape, Captain?” 

Steve twitches.  “Tony.”

“Oho, cold shoulder.  Ouch, man.  You’re just full of pointy edges today.  You should get that looked at, it’s not good for your stress levels.  I mean really darling, you’re going to give yourself an ulcer or something.”

“Tony, please shut up,” Steve says, forcing himself to be calm.  Tony is a shade.  A projection.  Harmless.  “I’m working.”

“I can see that, buttercup.” Tony smiles, all bright teeth, and steps closer. 

“What do you want, Tony?” 

“You’re not holding up so well, are you?”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’re slipping.  You almost lost your little organic creation earlier.  That’s not good, Steven.  You need to focus.”

“I’m trying.”

Tony’s eyes, dark brown, are flinty.  “Not hard enough, clearly.  Make more mistakes like that and the projections will gut you like a fish.”

“I said I’m trying.”

“What was it, a memory?  What did you remember, hm?  Afghanistan?  Bucky?  Rome?  Rome was great, let me tell you, I miss Rome.”

Steve checks the stairways again, just to be sure, then sighs.  “It was Rome,” he admits, though Tony knew that already.  He’s a projection.  He knows everything Steve knows.  “That night in the hotel, remember?  We danced.”

Tony laughs.  “I remember.  We were terrible.  You gotta get ahold of this, my friend.  You can’t be remembering these things while you’re trying to get the job done.”

Steve glares.  “It’d be easier if you’d _leave me alone._ ”

“Hey, I’m the projection here.  I’m only here because you can’t let me go.  Not that I blame you.  You did get me killed, after all.”

Steve turns away.

“Oh, baby, I didn’t mean it like that.  But that’s what you think, isn’t it?  It’s your fault.”

“It was.  I’m the one who made you do the inception.”

“Eh, details.  I went.  Besides, it’s not like we completed the job anyway.  We failed that time.”

“Because our mark died.”

“Yes, well.”  Tony shrugs fluidly.  He grins suddenly, bounding to the window to peer down into the garden.  “Nice touch.  I like the statue.”

Steve’s heart sinks.  “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice that.”

“I’ll always notice that,” Tony sings, a laugh in his voice.  “Walk with me.”

Steve hesitates.  He can’t just up and leave—what will Clint say? He has to be back in seven minutes so they can go under.  He doesn’t have time for this.  But—

But it’s Tony.  Steve never could say no to Tony.

Tony grins.  “Come on,” he sings, and bats his eyes ridiculously, smirking and becoming less a man in a suit and more coiled muscle, an offer, a promise. “I’ll make it worth your while, doctor.” 

Steve swears, feeling a little helpless.  “Lead the way.”

Tony beams and grabs Steve by the hand (his palms are rough, callous and scars.  Steve doesn’t remember quite so many scars), hauling him off towards the garden.  

“Why?” Steve asks and the Penrose stairs unfold, letting them get down to the bottom of the hospital.   

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Tony says.  He doesn’t so much as pull as become gravity—after a few hallways Steve’s following him without needing to be dragged, just a few steps behind Tony like it used to be, Tony running off and Steve his patient shadow.

They don’t meet any projections, and even from behind a heavy wooden door they can smell the garden.  Tony grins and opens it. 

Steve sighs.

He remembers building this part.  It’s the only part he remembers building, actually, the only piece of any of this he put in himself.  The rest is all blackouts and Tony, but this, this is his.

It’s a garden, half memory and full of unbloomed flowers.  Frost crackles on closed buds, holding everything in stasis, unchanging, unrealized. 

Steve’s mother loved gardens.  He loves them too, the pretty ones, but he doesn’t spend nearly enough time in them.

“Why are we here, Tony?”  Steve asks, and the garden smells like winter, old ice and dead flowers, but there’s that undercurrent of Berlin in it too, and Tony’s touch of hot metal. 

Tony shrugs.  “Dunno.  Nice place, though.  You’ve always been realistic, but this takes the cake.  Impressive, very impressive.”

“Thanks,” Steve says.  He looks anywhere but Tony.  Little frozen vines curl around his feet. 

“It looks familiar, though,” Tony continues, walking around the garden with his hands clasped behind his back.  “I remember this.”  He stops by an old white statue, Theseus and the minotaur, and traces the heavy marble lines.  The minotaur’s face, supposed to be savage, bestial, seems almost stricken.  “Rome, right?”

Steve doesn’t answer.  Tony’s his shade, he already knows.  He checks his watch.  Four minutes.  Clint’s going to be pissed. 

“Oh, don’t be like that,” Tony scolds, coming back to Steve’s side, surveying the garden.  His dark eyes seem to glow.  “You know better than to build from memory, Steve.  It’s dangerous.” 

“You used to build from memory.”

“Yeah, well,” Tony says, with a wide, cracking grin, “look how well that turned out for me, huh?  You’ve got to take better care of yourself, Steve.  I can’t look out for you all the time.”

“What makes you think I need you looking out for me?” Steve snaps, anger shifting under his skin.  He hates being here, this garden, with Tony and his hot metal smell, whose hair is longer than Steve remembers, whose eyes are tired and hard and fierce. 

Tony’s answering smile is vicious.  “You’ve always needed someone looking out for you, Steve.  Me, Bucky, Clint.  It’s true, don’t tell me it’s not.”

Steve wants to hit him.  He wants to hurt him, to kill him, to chase him away, to, to—

“Shh,” Tony says, and folds Steve into a hug.  The extractor flinches back, tries to pull away.  He doesn’t want this, this hurts, this _isn’t real_.  “It’ll be over soon,” Tony whispers, and there’s a hint of a threat to it, if you listen close enough.   

Steve pulls away.  “Leave,” he says.

Tony grins. “No.”

\----

Forgery is an imperfect art.  Every forger—and every forge—is different.  Natasha’s heard stories of some forgers who think of their work as art, painting on a canvas, others who think of it like identity theft, others still who think of it like changing clothes, putting on someone else’s skin as easily as they would a jacket.

For Natasha, it’s a bit like being unmade.  It’s terrifying.  She’s pulling herself out and putting someone else in, and there’s always that lingering threat that she could lose herself, that she could forget to remake _Natasha Romanoff_ and come back someone else entirely.

(It’s happened before.)

This time, though, the forge isn’t so bad.  Laufey’s skin was a prickly one to wear, vicious, cruel, larger than life.  _That’s_ one she could lose track of, disappear into, but Odin’s shape doesn’t fit.  It’s too loose, too worn out and wrinkled. 

She’s met the Wanderer once in person, a long time ago when the Black Widow was more than a ghost story.  Even then, ten years ago now, he was withering, past his prime.  She can’t imagine what it must be like to be Odin Borrsson, to be a relic of the past, watching the world march on without you.

Strange, she’d imagine.  Disconcerting.  A bit like being unmade in and of itself. 

No, Odin’s skin isn’t one she could forget to take off.  It doesn’t fit right.

But it’s good enough to fool Loki.  The moment he walks in his face goes sheet-white, the shadows like bruises under his eyes deepening into black holes.  “Father,” he says stiffly, and he seems to almost curl in on himself.

Thor blinks, leans closer to his adoptive brother.  “Father,” he rumbles.

Natasha arranges Odin’s face into a smile.  “Thor,” she rasps, “Loki.  My sons.”

Loki flinches.  Natasha pretends not to notice. 

“I did not expect to see you here again, Loki.”  She pauses, waiting for anger and guilt to stir in Loki’s bright eyes, then she smiles again.  “I am so glad you came.”

“Father,” Loki begins, then stops.  “ _Odin._ You’re not my father, are you?”

“Brother,” Thor says, reaching out, but the younger pulls away, his eyes a fever. 

“ _Are you_?”

“No,” Natasha says, because it’s true.  They can’t change that, no matter how much easier it would be if Odin actually was Loki’s father.  (But he isn’t, she can see that now.  Loki, though he doesn’t have Laufey’s tattoos, has his face, and his madness.)

Loki bares his teeth, drawing back.  “I knew it,” he hisses.  “It all makes sense now.  I used to wonder, did you know, why you wouldn’t look at me like you looked at Thor even though _I_ am the smarter one, _I_ am the crueler one.  Who wants to look at his enemy’s bastard son?” 

“Loki—”

“ _No,_ ” Laufey’s son snarls, suddenly very, very close, anger and something more glittering in his eyes, a knife glittering in his hands.  Natasha goes still.  “No, you don’t get to _explain_ yourself to me, _Father._ I’ve heard it all before.  You’re not as brave as Thor, Loki, you’re not as big, you’re not as loud, you’re not as _me_ as he is.  You can’t fight, all you can do is sit there and don’t say anything—”

“Brother,” Thor says, and his eyes are huge and sad.  “Stop this.  Please, just stop this.”

Natasha tilts her grizzled head to look out the open window.  From here she can just barely make out the gleam of Clint’s arrow, smell the frost from the garden below.  _Are you listening?_ she thinks.  _Can you hear this, Steve?_

“Loki,” she says again.  “My son.”

“ _I am not your son!_ Tell me, Odin, did it hurt to know your wife lay with a monster?  Did you shun her for the rest of her life too?”

“I love your mother dearly,” Natasha rumbles.  “And you are no bastard.”

This makes Loki stop.  He jerks back, surprised, his anger (not taken out of him, never, ever taken out of him) misdirected for a second.  “What?”

“You are no bastard,” she says.  “You are Laufey’s son through and through.” 

“Then how—?”

“I took you.”  Of course, they don’t know if this is true or not, if Odin really stole Loki from Laufey’s side.  But there are rumors, old ones, of the Wanderer stealing the Frost Giant’s treasure, and Natasha’s always assumed that it was something a little more like guns or gold, but you know what they say about assuming.  Loki might just be Odin’s stolen treasure. 

“You—” Loki splutters, at the same time Thor cries, “ _Father!”_ and Natasha remains unphased.  Thor might find this all a bit unpleasant, but they told him what he was signing up for.  This was never going to be an easy job.

“I took you,” she rumbles, strong, steady.  Loki takes a threatening step forward, knife in hand.  Clint is no doubt pulling back his bow.  “When you were very small, less than a month old.  I brought you home, and we raised you.”

“You _stole_ me?”

Natasha nods.

Loki pauses, eyes flashing almost gray in the light, and then he throws back his head and laughs, and laughs.  (Somewhere in the depths of the maze there’s shouting, and outside she hears the faint hint of gunfire on the wind.  She thinks, _please, Steve, be paying attention.  We don’t have much time._ ) 

“And I suppose my real father never came looking for me,” Loki says between gasps.  He looks like he’s in terrible, bone-deep pain. 

“He did,” Natasha murmurs.  It’s always hard forging a death.  It’s a little too real, a little too vivid, but she has to.  Her breath comes even shorter now.  “He searched for years.  We hid you too well, you and your brother.”

“Thor is _not_ my brother,” Loki snarls, and Thor draws back the hand he was offering.  “And _you_ are not my father.  You stole me!  Why?  Because you wanted to hurt Laufey?  Because you wanted a monster’s son, ready and available for use? Why?”

“Loki,” Natasha says. 

“ _Tell me!”_  The expression on Loki’s face is terrifying and wild and vicious, lips curled back, teeth bared.  Eyes like fractured mirrors.  There’s nothing in them. 

The heart monitor beeps, accelerating.  Natasha feels a death brewing beneath her sagging skin, close, very close.  It’s cold. 

(First level: _Laufey is your enemy.  He doesn’t want you._ Second level: _Odin does._ )

“Because,” she rasps, and coughs deeply.  Before he slipped into a coma, Odin spent months dying of sickness.  Natasha has been in Russian prison.  She knows what a slow, lingering death looks like.  “Because Thor... was not enough.”

“Father?”  There’s a question in Thor’s eyes, a startled hurt.  But he’ll recover from this.  He’s the recovering type. 

Loki is very still.  “What?” he breathes.  She hears it, then.  A crackle, like electricity.  A spark of hope.  The wind from the garden is cold.  She coughs again, a rattle. 

“Thor… was not enough.  Brave, yes.  Big… yes.  Strong.  Determined.  But Thor, you are… kind.  You can’t do what I did, what your brother can.  You are not enough to run Asgardian Enterprises.  You will… fail.  I knew, when you were a boy.  I knew… I knew.”

“You knew?” Loki prompts, quietly. 

“I knew…” she turns to him, focusing through Odin’s one good, bleary eye.  “That I needed someone better.”

Loki draws back again, recoiling, defensive. 

“That I needed…”

“A monster,” Loki whispers, shoulders curling.  He seems almost afraid. 

“No,” she says.  “I needed _you._ ”

Loki makes a sound, half snarl, half choke.  “You don’t mean that,” he whispers, those mirrors in his eyes flashing.  “You never meant that.”

“Loki,” says Natasha, tenderly.  “I do.” 

\----

“God fucking damn it,” Clint swears, tugging irritably at his fucking clown scrubs.  “Rogers, I am going to _kill you._ ” 

(He’s not, not really, but he’s seriously considering it.  He is too old for this shit, and Rogers needs to _stop wandering off_ so they can to their fucking job and go home.  But, of course, Steve staying put would sort of defeat the whole purpose of the thing, wouldn’t it?)

He checks his watch again.  Three minutes.  Natasha’s in full manipulator mode, voice deep and growling.  Thor’s not doing much other than watching, faintly bemused and definitely alarmed, and Loki, well. 

Loki is living up to his status as the enemy king, that’s for sure.  Clint isn’t sure how much of his performance is real and how much is acting, but he’s not wholly genuine, not at all.  There’s still _too much_ going on in his words, his gestures.  He’s playing a role.  Excellently, of course, but still. 

No one but Clint—Tasha too, probably—is going to pick up on it, though.  They’re the point and the forger (rook and bishop).  It’s their job to notice the details, and though Steve’s a smart guy, he’s not detail-oriented, not like Clint, not like Nat. 

Clint supposes that’s a good thing. 

Loki snarls at Odin, who snarls back, and Thor—the white king, useless until the very end—tries to get between them, but no, that’s not how it’s going to go down, is it?  That’s not how it’s planned.

Steve has three minutes. 

He needs to be up here.  They’re on a fucking schedule, damn it, they don’t have _time_ for this.

Down in the frosty garden, there’s a flash of motion.  Clint doesn’t look down.  He’s too busy keeping an eye on Loki, who looks about ten seconds away from knifing Tash at any given moment. 

(He knows what—well, who—is in the garden, though.  It can’t be anyone else, not down there, with the old white statues, the frozen flowers.  Poetic, Clint would say.  A manifestation of Steve’s subconscious.)

“ _Stop this,_ ” Thor is saying.  “ _Please, stop this._ ”

Down in the garden, everything stills.  Clint risks a glance down, trusting nothing will go wrong in the second it takes to sweep the little place.

Steve is gone.  Good.  He’ll be on time.

Tony, though, is still down there.  Tony, with his suit and his shades, Tony who’s wildly out of place here, Tony, Tony, always Tony.  The wounded queen.

He waves.

Clint looks away.  Two minutes. 

There’s gunfire in the distance.  Laufey and the militarized ones are breaking through the wall.  The projections downstairs are no doubt catching on, trying to get to them, seeking out the infection.

Steve will have blocked them off, though.  Clint trusts him to do that. 

Ninety seconds.  Steve bursts into the room, panting, and won’t look Clint in the eye.  The point man doesn’t ask. 

Instead, he says, “we secure?”

Steve nods.  “They’ll be held off for a while, anyway.”

“Good.”

The baby monitor crackles with the sudden burst of Loki’s fury, harsh, loud. 

“ _That I needed someone better,_ ” Natasha says, Odin’s voice worn almost out.  She’ll fake his death soon.  Clint holds on to his bow and waits. 

“ _A monster,_ ” and Steve doesn’t seem to be aware of the way his fingers curl and uncurl almost reflexively, loud enough to creak. 

“ _I needed you.”_

_“You don’t mean that.  You never meant that._ ”

“ _Loki,_ ” says Odin the Wanderer, rattle-gurgle, hoarse, fading, “ _I do._ ”

Odin dies in a quick spasm of limbs and heaving breaths.  It takes two seconds, max, and Clint checks his watch. 

He grins. 

Right on time. 

The arrow he lets loose is one that could only exist in a dream.  It’s loaded with sedative, the point not an arrowhead but a needle, and he lets it fly.  It slams into Loki’s shoulder, dropping the man like a rock.  Thor flinches, but doesn’t try and leave.

Instead, he crouches beside his brother and doesn’t react as Natasha sheds his father’s rumpled skin and steps out of the bed.

Clint turns to Steve.  “You good, man?”

Steve blinks and nods, catching himself.  “Yeah, yeah, just thinking.”

“About?”

The extractor—another bishop—shrugs, giving his best _I’m-a-trustworthy-motherfucker_ grin.  “Just running over the next level. Think we got Loki on this one?” 

Clint nods.  “Seems so.”  He waits, but Steve doesn’t say anything else.  No mention of the garden, of Tony, but that’s to be expected, isn’t it?  He shrugs.  He’ll deal.  “C’mon.  We’re gonna be late.”

Steve follows him back the way they came, through the maze to Natasha’s room.  Inside, she’s speaking to Thor softly, calmly.

Thor’s face is set into an anxious frown, but he seems alright.  Not too scarred, then.  Wonderful.

“Pack it up,” Clint barks, pulling another PASIV out from under the bed.  His hands are steady, though his nerves itch.  This room is cold.  “We’ve gotta move.” 

“I think it stuck,” Natasha says.  “Thor?”

“He looked stricken,” Thor rumbles.  “I haven’t seen him like that for many years.”

“So…?”  Steve asks, head tilted.

“So, I believe it worked,” Thor says.

Steve grins broadly and even Nat, usually no nonsense on jobs like these, smiles back.  (Steve can do that, smile and make you smile back.)   

“Two left, then,” Steve says.  “The next one’s Asgardian Enterprises, so be ready.  It’s a whole lot of glass.  Stay away from the windows if you can.”

“We know what to do,” Clint says jokingly, fondly.  He meets Natasha’s eyes over Loki’s body.  His gaze flickers to the window, the garden, once, and he blinks.  She blinks back.  She gets it.  “We’ve got this, right guys?”

“We’ve got this,” Steve says confidently, stretching to his full height.  The gunfire gets closer.  “We just have to—”

But he doesn’t get to finish.  The door swings open and Tony’s standing there, suit, sunglasses, and megawatt grin bared. 

“Sorry, honey,” he says cheerfully, stepping in and shutting the door behind him.  “We’re gonna have to change our plans, I’m afraid.”

“What do you mean?” Steve says, moving to meet Tony, hands out, concern and worry and guilt scrawling across his face. 

Tony grins, ignores him.  Turns to Clint.  “Hey, Barton!  Long time no see!  Man, you look like you got old.  I’ve only been gone a year.  You should stay away from the high stress, you know?  Don’t want to end up like Coulson.”

“Wait, Tony, what do you mean?”  Steve asks, still moving forward, but oh, Clint knows what’s about to happen.  (He’s a chessmaster.  He always knows.)

He closes his eyes. 

And Tony raises a gun, still smiling.  “Sorry,” he says, and he doesn’t sound sorry at all.  Typical Tony.  “It’s nothing personal.” 

“Steve,” Clint says. 

“Tony, wait, don’t—”  Steve lunges, but he’s too late.  He’s too late.  Tony raises the gun, teeth a glittering, ragged grin, and shoots Clint right between the eyes. 


	6. vi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOLY CRAP, SO SORRY IT TOOK THIS LONG. I really didn't mean to take two months to write this chapter, but you know how it goes. School, work, other projects, I have the attention span of a gnat, yadda yadda. 
> 
> So! I hope this isn't too hard for y'all to get back into. Thank you everyone who stayed with this story! You guys are the best <3
> 
> Super-thanks to Leah for the beta! Also, this is for true-south, who never gave up hope :)
> 
> Alternatively [here](http://zihna-zi.tumblr.com/post/30994943033/fic-shooting-stars-falling-objects-the-avengers-6-8).

shooting stars, falling objects

 

If this story was a fairytale, it would start like this;

Once upon a time, there was a garden.  Just a little, overgrown place, really, tucked between a few crumbling walls on the outskirts of an ancient city.  A forgotten corner of the world, left behind to grow over itself while the rest of the world moved on. 

Tony and Steve found it by accident while they were running from a sour job, darting from shadow to shadow and praying today wasn’t their last day.  The garden was almost—almost—too small to hide in, but they managed it, squeezed shoulder to shoulder in the long, flowering grass.

They survived by spending three days in that little garden.  There were tiny apple trees and a few bird nests with eggs just barely bigger than Steve’s thumbnail, just enough to eat.  They played chess with the heads of flowers and lines in the dirt, told secrets, swapped war stories.  Built dreams out of sand and bits of broken stone.  Slept against the cool white statues and caught rainwater in the minotaur’s outstretched hand.  Laughed (quietly, of course) whenever they heard their hunters crash by outside.   

It wasn’t actually that bad, not really.  Much, much better than Berlin.  Steve can still remember the smell, heat and just-bloomed flowers.  If this story was a fairytale, the garden would be their sanctuary, their tall castle. 

If this story was a fairytale, they never would have left that garden.  They would have stayed and been kings of their own little world, safe from the rest of it.  If this story was a fairytale, there would be no knights or dragons, just Tony and Steve, and all their friends would be alive and happy and safe.

If this story was a fairytale, Steve thinks, it would have had a happily ever after. 

But they never do, do they?  Natasha once told him, deeply amused when he asked her if she loved Clint and Phil, that love was for children. She owed them a debt.  She didn’t say what kind of debt, exactly, but Steve knew. 

She’s right.  Love, like fairytales, is for children.  He didn’t love Tony, not like he thought he would when he was a skinny kid with scraped knees and aspirations bigger than himself.  What he and Tony had was coffee at all hours of the day and snark in the afternoon, lazy mornings in the sun and late nights spent wrapped in their work and each other, the lines of dreams and reality blurring in the most delicious ways.

It was light Steve could hold, flowers that bloomed in his hands.  It wasn’t love, it was just _Tony._

Still, though, he can’t forget the little garden in the corner of the old world, even if he’s outgrown it like a child outgrowing the stories of knights and princesses and magic.   He doesn’t dream it often, but he likes to.  He likes remembering that there were good times too, before all this. 

It’s the memory of their garden— _their_ garden, their own forgotten corner of the world—that stops Steve from shooting Tony  the second he fires on Clint.

Natasha has no such problems.

Tony’s still grinning when he collapses, his dark brown eyes going hollow in a heartbeat, blood  flowering on his crisp white shirt.  He drops heavily, with more sound than what Steve thinks a shade should have.  Steve flinches, but doesn’t move.

Natasha does, dropping her gun, swearing up and down in Russian.  She catches Clint, lowers him to the floor, and _oh god, Tony_ shot _Clint._

“I’m sorry,” Steve chokes, dropping to his knees beside Clint.  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Mean to what?” Natasha snaps, her eyes nearly black with fury and fear.  She pushes her hands over Clint’s head and hisses a _shhhh,_ low and soothing _._ Her pale fingers turn red and sticky.   Clint’s already gone.

“I didn’t think Tony was dangerous,” Steve says helplessly, because it’s _true._ Tony’s not a violent shade.  He’s never hurt them before.  He just watches, usually, offers advice, builds when Steve lets him—

“You didn’t tell us,” she hisses.  “You let us walk in your head like nothing was wrong.  We _trusted_ you to tell us and you never did, we had to puzzle is out for ourselves—”

“Wait, what?” 

Natasha glares at Steve, her eyes a fire.  “We knew,” she says through gritted teeth, pulling her hands off Clint. “We knew that—that you had a shade.  That you were dreaming Tony.”

“You knew?”

Natasha nods.  “We knew.”

“Why did you come down here then?” Steve snaps, throwing his hands up.  “Why would you even _think_ about coming down here with me, knowing I’ve got a shade, don’t you know how dangerous that is?”

“Don’t you know how dangerous hiding it from your teammates is?” Natasha snarls back.

Steve shuts up, squeezing his eyes closed.  “I didn’t mean to,” he says.  His voice sounds small.  “I just—Tony never hurt anyone before.  I didn’t know he would.”

Natasha snorts and turns away.  “What do you want me to say?” she says.  She’s getting herself under control again. “That it’s not your fault?”

 “Yes it is,” Steve whispers.  “Yes it is.  I didn’t tell you, I didn’t warn you, I knew the risk and didn’t say anything—”

“Then that’s on you,” Natasha cuts in.  “You should have told us.  You could have trusted us with this and you know it.”  She softens, petting Clint’s hair absently, almost like she’s not aware of doing it.   “But don’t blame yourself for this,” she adds heavily, blood seeping between her fingers.  She softens a little more, most of her anger fading.  “You can’t control your projections.  It’s not your fault.”

“But I—”

“Accept responsibility,” she says, and he’s reminded that out of all his teammates, she’s probably the one who understands him the best.  Not Coulson, who knows everything but can only put it into lists, not practice.  Not Bruce, who sees everything as a reaction of a reaction of a reaction, always looking for the original catalyst.  Not Clint, even though they were both soldiers.  Only Natasha _gets_ it.  She’s scraped the bottom too.   “Then move on.”

“How?”  He’s angry now, helplessly, stupidly angry, at himself, at them, at Tony.  “Clint’s dead!  And it’s my fault!”

“This is a dream, is it not?” Thor rumbles curiously.  “Will he not just wake up above?”

_Shit._

“No,” Natasha says smoothly.  “He won’t.  Because this job required so many layers, we had to add a sedative to the mix.  He can’t wake up just yet.”

“So what happens to him?  Is he dead?”

“No,” Steve mutters.  “No, he’s just… dropped down more levels, into another dream.”  He doesn’t mention limbo.  Somehow he thinks Thor won’t take limbo well. 

“Then why do we not just go down and retrieve him?” the blonde man says, head tilted.  “That was the plan anyway, yes?  Two more levels?”

“Just one now,” Natasha says.  “Clint was supposed to hold the third level, and Steve had the forth.  We can’t do the third level now.”  Another stab of guilt, knife-sharp and crippling.

“I could hold it,” Thor says helpfully.  “You showed me the designs.  It is not difficult to maintain a dream, is it?”

Natasha and Steve share a glance.  “Wouldn’t work,” she says finally.  “We’d still need another dreamer to drop down an extra level—” limbo “—and get Clint.” 

“We cut a level out,” Steve murmurs, trying not to look at Clint’s body, at Tony’s.  “Clint’s level, the building.  We just cut it out, and do the last one instead.”

“Are you sure?  That level is teaching Loki that Thor can’t run the company by himself.  It’s _important,_ ” Natasha says. 

“So is the last level.  We were always going to make it all stick there, we just have to simplify the idea.”

“Down to what?” 

Steve pauses.  What is strong enough—positive enough—to reach Loki?  What can they do to make him believe in Thor’s ideals, not Laufey’s? 

“ _I am loved,_ ” he says suddenly, turning to all of them, what’s left of his little team.  “That’s the most positive thing, isn’t it?  What he’s been searching for all this time?  He couldn’t find it in Odin so he looked for it in Laufey.  And _you,”_ he says, turning to Thor, “you actually love him.  He’ll forgive you.  He’ll reconcile with you.”

Thor seems hesitant in a way Steve can understand.  “I did not help him,” Thor says.  “I didn’t realize, even when we were children, that he felt this way.  I allowed him to continue living thinking that we, his family, did not love him.  I failed.”

“You didn’t,” Steve says fiercely.  “People make mistakes.  I should know, I’ve made a lot of them.  But they’re _mistakes._ I mean, it’s not like you hated him, right?  You didn’t go out of your way to treat him like an outsider.”

Thor considers that, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully.  “I do not think so,” he says.  “Any exclusion he felt was by accident.  But still.  I am his older brother.  It is my job to watch over him, and I have done a poor job of that.”

“So fix it,” Steve urges.  “Make it better.  Show him that there is a way to be good again.  Bring him home.  Let him _forgive you._ ”

“But what if I do not deserve it?” Thor asks.  He seems almost afraid, unsure of himself.  It must be a new feeling for him, Steve thinks.  It’s actually kind of sad to watch.

“Everyone deserves forgiveness,” he says firmly.  “Even you.”

“Even you,” Natasha adds, her eyes the softest Steve has ever seen them.  He blinks, startled.  She looks kind, crouched their beside Clint with his blood on her hands, smeared across her cheeks.  He doesn’t think he’s ever seen her that kind before, and he wonders where it came from. 

“This isn’t about me,” Steve mutters.  She looks pointedly at Tony’s body.  _Of course it is_ is written plainly across her face. 

Thor’s frown deepens, but he doesn’t say anything. 

“You can help him,” Steve insists.  “Otherwise, we’re done here.  The inception will have failed.”

Caught between these two extremes, Thor worries his lip.   “Of course I will help him,” he finally says.  “As best as I am able, anyway. I fear that I won’t do much good.”

“You’re going to do a world of good,” Steve says, turning back to Natasha.  “I’m so sorry about what happened.”

She shakes her head, but her face is still kind.  “I can hold the level,” she says, in lieu of another lecture, or empty words of faith.  She is all business again, her feelings compartmentalized away for a later time.  (When vodka and a punching bag is available, most likely.)  “Good luck down there.  Remember rule one.”

A ghost of a grin crosses Steve’s lips, and he nods.  “See you topside.  Thor, do you know the forth level?”

The tourist nods.  “Aye.  The masquerade, yes?  You showed it to me before we went under.”

“You’re sure you’ve got it?”

Another nod.

“Alright.  I’ll start dreaming it, and then I’ll shift it over to you.  You’re going to feel it fall under your control, okay?  It’s going to feel weird, but you’ve got to hold onto right away or it’ll collapse.”

“I can do it,” Thor says firmly, looking down at his brother. 

“We trust you,” Natasha says. She helps them get the PASIV in their arms and Steve thumbs his pocket, feeling his totem’s weight.  “Watch out for projections,” he says. 

She huffs a laugh, a little bit like her old self, fire and wicked humor.  “It’ll be fun,” she says.  “Bye, Steve.”

And he’s gone.

\-----

When Steve said, _hold off the projections, Bruce,_ he didn’t quite envision that it going like this. 

See, there’s a thing about Bruce that most people never guess.  He seems all mild-mannered and squishy— _fucking adorable,_ Tony said, with deepest affection—on the outside, but on the inside, well, there’s a reason he had to find work as a chemist for a bunch of thieves. 

Bruce, as a general rule, doesn’t talk about it unless he has to.  He also doesn’t dream too often, and the reasoning behind that decision is only half the fact that he knows what somnacin does to the brain. 

Hold off the projections, Steve said.  It’ll be a piece of cake, he said. 

Yeah right. 

Bruce is currently dangling off the side of a building, his pockets full of grenades and a knife clenched between his teeth, and there’s a horde of screaming, clawing projections below him, and this was _nothing_ he was ever trained for. 

Should’ve expected it, though.  This job was always going to be the most difficult one, and his usual tactic of lurking in the shadows and avoiding high-stress situations was never going to cut it.  Natasha and Clint had told him as much, when they outlined the plan to him while Steve was busy on the models.

 _Still,_ he thinks, carefully maneuvering his way back to the window.  As he goes, the grenades in his pocket unwind, falling to swing in the breeze, strung up high above the seething crowd. 

The projections either don’t see the grenades or just don’t care, because they keep pressing against the building, slamming on the reinforced glass protecting the building.  It cracks under the strain.  It hasn’t splintered yet (Bruce hopes it won’t reach that point) but the hairline fractures are there, weakening the structure as a whole.

His trap laid, Bruce clambers back into the safety of the room, just in time to avoid bullets that sing and bounce harmlessly off the windowsill.

“You missed!” Bruce shouts down at the crowd.  The projections line up to take another shot, uncaring.  Determined fuckers. 

But his work is done.  Between the charges he set before he wiped out the elevator and the string of grenades, he’s tucked in here nice and cozy.

There are six minutes left on the clock, one for each of the people he’s in charge of protecting.  Bruce kicks back, satisfied.  No one should be able to get up here, what with the booby traps and the sheer improbability of the architecture (though this has been a job full of unpleasant surprises.  If any projections are going to beat the maze, it’s these ones), but even if they do, well.

Bruce Banner has no need to hide his secrets, not up here.  His teammates are all unconscious, and there’s no one to witness what he is, what he can become. 

He smiles, and reaches deep inside himself.

\-----

The moment of awakening is blurred.  Usually it’s a clean transition, smooth and virtually painless.  This time, though, Steve can feel the layers of the dream fall into place around him, heavy and awkward.  The fabric is rough and slightly off, and somnacin is a strong, acid taste in his mouth.

He palms the weight of his dog tags, just to reassure himself.  They’re heavy.  He’s dreaming. 

The dream transitions from him to Thor awkwardly, but it does, he can feel it.  The dream is not his to control.  It’s Thor’s.  He hopes that faith isn’t misguided.  He doesn’t think it is—Thor will do whatever he has to to save his brother—but he can’t be sure. 

Steve stands, clumsy on waking legs.  The world around him is a small maze, relative to the others.  It’s not a city or a hospital, or even the single building the last level was supposed to be.  It’s just one floor, an intricate knot of loops closed in and around itself.  Outside, thunder booms and lightning flashes, stirring up wind and old leaves.

Steve sets off.  Thor and Loki will have woken—hopefully more smoothly—somewhere safer.

Deep in the maze of winding, gilded hallways, the music starts.

Steve designed this level based of Loki’s old hotel fortress.  The basic structure was simple to copy—good old Gothic style—and the rest was just adding in details.  He had fun with this one.  He restored the hotel to what might have been its formerly glory.  The paint doesn’t peel anymore and the marble floors shine.  The staircases are rich mahogany and velvet, the windows thrown wide to let in sweet night air.  Gentle candlelight casts playful shadows on the wall, and the hallways are lit with laughter.

In the ballroom, the great chandelier hangs high, dripping diamonds and swaying in the slight breeze.  Steve pauses to check his reflection in the mirror, adjusting his bowtie (he never could get the hang of those.  Tony would always have to laugh at and help him).  He looks like he belongs here.  The tux is pressed and cut to his shoulders, his hair is slicked back in “Douchebag #1 Style” (Clint’s term), and his plain black mask covers his everything but his mouth, turned up in a slight smirk.

None of the projections look twice at him as he slides in between them, gently shaking off masked women and suited men. 

In the center of the ballroom, Loki and Thor are facing off, circling each other.  Thor’s mask is a strong, gleaming gold, a lion’s face that fits with his mane of hair and broad shoulders.  Loki’s mask is a little more complicated.  It’s shifting, constantly changing and rearranging shape.  Wolf, lion, snake, bird, all dark-colored and shot through with bits of green.

Loki doesn’t seem to notice, but his eyes are bright as he watches his adopted brother warily.  “Thor,” he says.  It’s unclear how much of the previous dream he remembers.  Does he remember standing beside Odin’s bed, listening to the old man apologize?

Subconciously, Steve would say yeah, he does.  The projections are reacting positively to Thor.  They’re not trying to kill him, at least, and for that Steve is grateful. 

It makes his job easier.

He lets a nameless, faceless woman pull him on to the dance floor, spinning him in slow, lazy loops.  He told Thor what to do, but all in all, he’s pretty useless here.  It’s all up to Thor—Steve’s face is meaningless to Loki.

“What are you doing here?” Loki hisses, circling restlessly.  His mask sticks in the shape of a hawk’s for a second, long enough to see a flash of long, narrow beak.  Then it’s a wolf’s muzzle, slimming into a fox’s curving grin, all the sides of Loki’s nature on display.

“You invited me,” Thor says, puzzled.  “Don’t you remember?”

“I invited you,” Loki repeats.  He doesn’t sound like he believes it, and the projections bristle, reflecting his wariness. 

Thor nods.  “Aye,” he says.  He, for Steve’s benefit, doesn’t bother switching to Swedish.  “You told me it was time to mend our differences.”

“ _I_ said that?”  Disbelief makes Loki’s mask a broad-nosed serpent’s, teeth glittering before the rippling expanse of fabric. 

“Aye,” Thor repeats.  He puts concern into his voice, stepping forward with his hand outstretched.  “Are you well, brother?  It is not like you to forget so easily.  We talked only yesterday.”

“I’m fine,” Loki snaps, and he makes himself believe it.  (The mask is a fox’s face again.)  The projections turn away.  “What do you want from me, Thor?”

“Nothing at all,” Thor says immediately.  “Of course, if you want to come help me sort out the underlings, that would be much appreciated.  I don’t think they understand what the stock market is.”

Loki smiles reflexively.  “And you do?”

“True enough,” Thor says, a grin splitting his face.  Loki answers with his own quick, bright smile, and for a second, Steve gets a look into someone else’s fairytale.

The moment is broken by Loki’s quick, wary eyes, and in the crowd, Steve sees a flash of gun metal.  The projections are stirring. 

“What do you want, Thor?”

“As I said,” Thor says, tenderly, “I want nothing at all.  I just wanted to see you, brother.”

“You keep calling me that,” Loki snaps, his fluid mask shifting into a wolf’s snarling grin.  A wolf for pain, then.  “But I am _not_ your brother.  I never have been.”

“Do you really believe that?”  Thor says, sounding unruffled.  “We played together.  We fought together.  Do you remember none of that?”

“I remember a shadow,” Loki snarls, and Steve’s distracted from what comes next by a flash of white across the room, a mask above a wide, easy grin.

For a second he thinks he sees Tony out there, mixed in with the other projections, and he has to stop himself from going forward to find him.  The projection he’s dancing with makes an unhappy sound, her eyes brilliant and suspicious through the holes in her feathered mask.

Steve smiles quickly.  “Just thought I saw someone I knew,” he says. 

His projection laughs.  “How would you even tell?”  she asks.  “We’re all wearing masks.”

“Got a point there,” Steve mutters, turning his attention back to the mindless dance (he’s finally learned how to waltz, after all these years, a combined effort between Peggy and Tony while Pepper cracked up from the couch) and Thor and Loki’s conversations.

“We are not of the same blood,” Thor says strongly.  He leans forward, hand out, intimate.  Loki pulls away.  “But that does not mean you are not my brother.”

Loki’s lip curls, but the anger from Odin’s hospital room is gone, hollowed out.  “Oh?  So you are willing to claim any ratty mutt off the streets as your family?”

“Not at all,” Thor says.  “But you are no ratty dog.  You are my brother.”

“You say that with such conviction.”

“Because it’s true.”

“How can it be?”  Loki snaps, pacing, restless, never stilling long enough for his mask to be one shape.  “I am not your family.  You certaintly never acted like it.”

“I did not know you felt yourself an outsider,” Thor rumbles, shame crossing the lines beneath his mask.  “I did not know you were suffering.  In that, I have failed you.”

“Liar,” Loki spits.  More guns stir in the hands of projections, and they prowl the edges of the whirling crowd.  Steve watches them, and prays.  “You only cared for me when it was convenient.  You only protected me when you yourself would be insulted as a result.”

“I tried,” Thor says.  “Brother, I tried.  I made mistakes.  I should have been there for you, to protect you, and I was not.  For that, I am truly sorry.  But I _tried._ ”

“It wasn’t enough,” Loki hisses, so sure of the strength of his own wounds.  “You were not there for me, _none_ of you were there for me.  How can you claim to love me when you spent twenty-four years saying otherwise?”

“I have always told you that I loved you,” Thor says.

“Empty words, _brother,_ empty words.  You did not mean them when we were children and you do not mean them now.”

“So, what, because of a child’s failings, you condemn yourself to _this?_ ”  Thor gestures around him, at the opulent ballroom, all grinning masks and spinning colors.  “A playgroud, where no one knows your true face?  Where your only friends are money and masks?”

“They served our father well enough,” Loki says, perhaps a little bitterly.  “Perhaps I can make them work for me, too.”

“What kind of life is that?” Thor cries.  “What life is that for a man to live?  You cling so tightly to your hurts, my brother.  You do not know how to let them go.  They are destroying you.”

“I’m doing rather well for myself, thanks—”

“Yes, with the Frost Giant on your tail and all your contacts running scared!”  Thor steps forward suddenly, wrapping his huge hands around Loki’s fine lapels, pulling him so close their masks are almost touching. 

Loki, to his credit, barely blinks, and the projections stay put.  He wants to believe Thor, he does, Steve can see that he does.  He just doesn’t know _how._  

Loki’s eyes are like mirrors as he says, “I can fix this.”

Thor laughs.  “Of course you can.  I don’t doubt that.  You have always been skilled at solving even the most difficult problems.  But it’s a cycle, don’t you see?  Perhaps you will be able to defeat the Frost Giant, convince him that you’re nothing more than a harmless small-timer, but there will be others.  Odin had no limit of enemies, and they will not hesitate to jump after you, his heir.”

“By that logic, you too are in danger.”

“Not as much,” Thor returns.  “I do not go out and invite death to my front door.”

Loki curls his lip.  “So now you disagree with my life choices.”

“Very much,” the taller man agrees. He does not release his brother.  “Because I want you to be happy.  Does this make you happy, brother?  This killing, this fear?  This knowledge that one day, someone—a rival lord, a man of the law, your lover while you sleep—will kill you?”

Loki bares his teeth.  “Does it make you happy to know that I will die, and you will be rid of me forever?”

“No, Loki,” Thor says, his eyes bright and genuine beneath his mask.  “It does not.”

“What will make you happy, then?  What will get you to leave me alone?”

“Your happiness will make me happy,” Thor says, and he sounds honest, he really does.  He doesn’t seem capable of lying.  “You give up this poisonous dream.  You come home.  You create  a life for yourself, one away from all this blood and death our fathers left for us.”

“It’s not that easy,” Loki says, his eyes searching Thor’s.  He doesn’t try to pull away, and Steve watches with bated breath.  This is it.  He can feel it.

“It is,” Thor says gently.  “There is a way to be good again, my brother.  You just have to try.”

“And if I don’t?”  The expression on Loki’s face—what’s visible of it, anyway—is hard and fierce and just a little scared. 

Thor softens.  “Then know that I love you,” he says.  “I will always regret the mistakes I made when we were children.  I am sorry that I caused you so much pain, and know that I only wish to mend it.” 

“You can’t love someone that much,” Loki disagrees, his whole body wound tight.  “You can’t love someone enough.”

“You can,” Thor says.  “I love you.  All I ask is that you come home with me.  That you are safe and happy again.”

“Not forgiveness?”  Loki says suspiciously.

“It is not my place to ask,” Thor hums.  He smiles widely, pulling his brother closer.  “I just want you to be happy, little brother.”

Loki’s eyes are dark beneath his mask, green mirrors fractured clean down the middle.  “And what if my happiness does not lie with you, but with another?”

“Then all I ask is that you write,” Thor says lightly.  “Just don’t let yourself become this, our father’s shadow.  You are brighter than he ever was.   You are meant for _more._ ”

Loki’s mask seems to settle on a fox’s face, long-muzzled and grinning, and he offers Thor a sharp smile beneath it.  “How much more?”  he asks, and Steve can tell from the look on Thor’s face (sheer, outrageous _joy_ ) that it’s a forgiveness, an admission, the happy end to their fairytale.

He relaxes. 

They’ve done it.

\-----

Determination and maybe a little guilt keep Natasha running through the hospital hallways, laying down charges as quickly as she can manage.

Outside, the projections are rioting, tearing at the hospital walls and spraying buckshot through the windows.  Steve’s ivy-covered wall holds the intimidating ones at bay, but in the lower levels, the doctors and nurses and even the patients are clawing at the walls, trying to get out of her.

The dream is rapidly descending into _Dawn of the Dead._

But sheer determination gets her though the paranoia, her trained senses screaming _go back, this is about to go sideways!_  (Guilt gets her through the rest.)

When the charges are set, she returns to Odin’s hotel room, where her teammates lay unconscious-and-or-dead and generally in the way.  (If she kicks at Tony’s body as she passes, well, no one’s awake to see it and it makes her feel a little better.)

Down below, there are projections ringed on all sides of the garden, glaring up at her and taking aim.  None of them actually seem to want to cross the flowers or pass the minotaur’s statue, but a few of them have _grenade launchers,_ Jesus fuck, it’s time to get the hell out of here.

The only problem with the design of this dream is that, while it’s safe on the top levels, it’s not designed to withstand things like grenade launcers and bombs.  That would defeat the purpose of the dream, since they’re using the charges as their kick, and if they fireproofed the place, they’d be stuck here.  Steve was insistent on that, when Clint and Natasha pointed out the design flaw during planning.

Fortunately for Natasha, Steve is currently unconscious, and won’t wake up in time to change the dream back.  She can do whatever the hell she wants.

She dreams up a new window in a heartbeat.  The glass is that new metallic palladium stuff Tony was going on and on about, supposed to be stronger than steel, and an RPG shatters against it without so much as cracking it.

She grins. 

 _Fuckers,_ she thinks, smug. The projections roar, and don’t cross the garden. 

It’s a pretty thing, Steve’s garden.  She’s not sure if he meant to put it in or not, but whatever it is, whatever it means to him, it’s doing a good job of keeping the projections at bay.

Pepper Potts, before Berlin, had a theory about Steve.  (Actually, she had a lot of theories about Steve, because it was her job to basically run Tony’s life and that included his romantic one.)  She thought that Steve was a creature of stark, clean lines, just as much as Tony was a thing of shades of gray.

“There’s no middle ground with Steve,” Pepper had said, once when they were in Paris, watching the boys tear through the Lourve like it was a playground and not the greatest collection of artwork and history the world has ever seen. 

Natasha eyed them fondly, already head over heels for them, for her _friends,_ a word as frightening as it was liberating.  “I could see that,” she said.

That night, she had gone under and forged each and every one of them.  Clint and Tony were easy—shades of gray like herself, layers upon layers and issues miles deep—and Bruce was fun (if a bit of a tight squeeze, his skin felt _stretched_ like there was something bigger beneath it, and Coulson’s gave her a headache, but Steve’s shape was impossible to pin down.

She tried for hours.  She could get his face down, no problem.  His clothes, too, and the way he carried himself.  His wide, honest grin, everything down to the part in his hair, but it was a shitty forgery, and anyone who saw would know. 

She just couldn’t get _Steve_ right. 

Now, she thinks it’s because he is such clean, clear-cut edges.  She can’t imagine being like that, with right and wrong set so easily in front of her.  Her world is made up of degrees and blurred lines.  Nothing is simple or straightforward, but Steve’s world is. 

Betraying a friend is bad.  Saving a friend is good.  Good is good, bad is bad.  There’s nothing in-between.  Or at least, there didn’t used to be.

Natasha should have _known,_ the second he asked her to lie for him, that something was up.  Steve didn’t believe in lies and secrets, especially not towards Tony.  He asked her to keep a secret, and she almost said no, almost, almost.

(But it was Tony who showed her the dreaming dens, last year right before Berlin.  He had been in the dreaming business almost as long as she had, and it’s always different for architects than it is for forgers.  He spent so much time building his own little kingdoms that reality just wasn’t _enough_ anymore.

She could relate.

Tony took her to Mombasa and showed her the dens, the air sweet and heavy with somnacin and the promise of _more._ Just before they had gone under, he had grabbed her wrist, more contact than he usually went for. 

“Don’t tell Steve,” he had said.  He drummed his fingers against his own totem—the scars from his heart surgery, never present in a dream—anxiously, quick eyes searching hers.

She had almost refused.  Natasha was tired of being the secret-keeper, and it was a terrible idea, she _knew_ it was.  Tony was their architect.  If he became compromised, they all were fucked. 

But she was  tired and angry and she was aching for a hit, anything to take the edge off, and she’d heard of these dreaming dens.  They didn’t just take the edge off, they obliterated it and danced on its grave.

“Okay,” she had said.  Tony grinned.)

She had lied for Steve.  She _knew_ Erskine was fucked, she knew it, everyone who kept an ear to the ground knew it.  He had been in deep with Schmidt, years ago, and betrayal like that wasn’t easily forgiven. 

And the double combination of Steve who ruined Schmidt and Erskine who betrayed him was too tempting for what was left of his followers. 

Natasha should have known. 

But she didn’t say anything. Steve’s trust in her (and in the black-and-white quality of human nature, in _I beat you and so you’re done_ ) was misplaced.  Berlin happened.

She thinks that he forgets, sometimes, that he wasn’t the only one of them who lost people that night.  He thinks of Pepper and Peggy and Erskine and Tony and says, _I have lost everyone,_ but he forgets, doesn’t he, that Coulson called her too, and she spent the whole flight over pacing and trying not to cry.

There’s a reason she’s doing this job, here and now.  It’s the same reason Steve took it too.  Old debts are strange, compelling things.  She, like he, has become compromised.  There’s red in her ledger.  She kept too many secrets, and they hurt too many people, Steve included.

It’s determination that steadies her gun, helps her hold her focus as she charges a projection and snaps his neck easily. 

It’s guilt that has her moving on to the next one, and the next, and the next.

She has twenty-two minutes left in the dream. 

 _Good luck,_ she thinks, glancing over at her sleeping companions.  _I’ll make them count._

The projections are coming.  Some of them will have figured out the Penrose loops now, will be bounding up their stairs, seeking her out. 

Twenty-one minutes. 

She smiles.  Let them come.

\-----

From the ballroom, it’s easy to get Loki into an out-of-the-way room and stick a syringe in his neck, dropping him like a long-limbed sack of potatoes. 

“Did it work?”  Thor’s eyes are wide and he is trembling, just a little, looking down at his brother with an expression that Steve recognizes but can’t name. 

“Yeah,” Steve says.  “I think so.  He forgave you.”  The dream reflects that, he thinks.  The storm outside has passed and all the projections dance, laughing and singing to each other.  There’s no violence here, no looming Frost Giant.  It seems that whatever albatross Loki was carrying, he laid to rest. 

Good. 

Steve breathes a sigh of relief, letting is shoulders slump a little.  That was exhausting, but it _worked._ They planted the idea, and it seemed like Loki had taken to it. 

“So what now?” Thor rumbles, settling beside his sleeping brother.  He is very protective, in a way that Steve remembers. 

“Now,” I go down and pick up Clint,” Steve says.  They didn’t tell Thor about the kicks so he’ll have to explain it, but he’s pretty sure the man will pick it up.  “When you hear the words—the song— _retorna me,_ you need to drag both me and Loki to the edge of the roof, okay?”

“Alright,” Thor says, puzzled.  “Why?”

“To wake us up,” Steve explains.  “When the song ends, throw us over the side, and then follow.”

“Will we not die?”

“We won’t,” Steve promises.  “The feeling of falling is a trigger.  We’ll just wake up through the layers.”

“You are sure?”  Thor says, a little doubtfully, and Steve gives him his best trustworthy grin. 

“I’m sure,” he says.

Thor dips his head.  “Very well.   You have proven yourself trustworthy.  I will do as you say.”

“Good,” Steve says, and he looks down at his feet.  A PASIV is there, silver and waiting.  “See you topside, then.”

Thor helps him slide in the needle with gentle, steady hands.  He’s cold, which is a little weird, but Steve can’t be bothered with it, he’s ready to go get Clint and get the hell out of here. 

“Thank you for what you have done,” Thor says sincerely, pressing the orange button.  Steve’s eyes grow heavy.  “You have given my brother a way to be good again.”

Steve smiles sleepily.  “All in a day’s work,” he says jokingly, feeling the rising tide sweep up.  He doesn’t fight it. Tony is there at his side, petting his hair fondly. 

“See you down there,” the shade says, and Steve’s going, going.

His dog tags sit heavy in his pocket, unchecked, and the dream slips away.  He has time to think,  _if this story was a fairytale, this chapter would be a warning.  Here be monsters.  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here._

"Oh, don't be so melodramatic, darling," Tony says, his voice alternately fading and growing brighter.  "You and I both know we passed  _that_ a long time ago."

Steve almost smiles.  Tony has a point.  Then, he's gone.  

He is not awake to see it to collapse in on itself, dissolving like snow.  The masquerade collapses and the hotel tears itself to dust, lost without anyone to hold it up.


	7. vii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nearing the end now, folks! Woo!
> 
> Thanks to Leah for the beta!! <3

shooting stars, falling objects

 

Once, a long time ago, Steve saved Tony’s life.  This was before dreamshare, before Bucky, before Steve had even grown tired of war, before he started hating sand and the feel of it under his boots.

Tony Stark, before dreamshare, was an asshole.  He was an asshole after it too, but more so before, when he thought he ruled the world.

He didn’t.

Insurgents caught him in Afghanistan, dragged him deep underground, and told the world he was dead.  The world believed them, and for three months, they made Tony build them dreams. 

Steve doesn’t know how Tony got out of there, and he probably never will, but he can guess.  (You don’t want a man you’re keeping captive building your dreams.)  Tony did, though, three months later, and it was Steve’s unit who found him wandering in the desert.

Steve saved his life.  He carried Tony—then stick-thin and dehydrated, delirious and chatty—three miles back to base, and they took care of him—which mostly involved keeping him entertained so he didn’t blow them all up by accident, he apparently had a habit of doing that—until government ops came and took him away. 

That was six months before Bucky died.  When Steve was kicked out and shipped back home, Tony fucking Stark was sitting on his crumby doorstep, sunglasses and billion-dollar grin bared.

“Hi,” he had said.  “Want a job?”

Steve should’ve said no.  He should’ve walked away and changed his name and address and hairstyle and never gone back again, because Tony Stark was trouble, everyone knew it.  He should’ve said no thanks, fuck off, go pick on some other dumb shmuck.

Steve should have done all of these things, but he didn’t.  He said yes. 

It’s funny, he thinks, who ended up saving who. 

\-----

Steve opens his eyes.  Salt water stings, clogs his nose, and he struggles to wake, the sea tugging at him, waves washing over his ankles.  

He stands up.

He’s alone.  Or close to it, anyway.  He’s not sure who’s down here in limbo, who’s made it out before and who’s been stuck for years.  (Centuries, in their own minds.) 

He starts walking.  At his back the ocean stretches as far as he can see, as far as he can imagine, a crisp, pristine blue topped with white where the waves peak and crash.  In front, there’s nothing.  A few crumbling remains of a city, tatters of someone else’s dream.  He doesn’t know whose, doesn’t care to know, but it makes him uncomfortable and wary in the way that dolls on the side of the road in the desert made him wary, the way distorted sunlight or a fast-moving shadow made him wary.

Coming down alone wasn’t a good idea, he can see that now.  He wishes Natasha was here with him, or Coulson, or Clint.  Anyone at all.

But Clint’s dead, isn’t he?  Clint’s trapped down here and it’s Steve’s fault.  Steve has to get him, bring him home again, and they can put all of this behind them.    

He hopes that Thor has a good hold on Loki. This could take a while.

The dream shivers almost imperceptibly when he steps onto the shore, leaving the sea behind.  It hardens, somehow, becomes more solid.  The air grows hot and sticky and he can taste the ocean on his tongue.  Sweat beads around his eyes, and wishes for a pair of sunglasses to block out the clear, strong sun.

Just like that, there’s a pair in his hands.  He drops them. 

 _Too real,_ he thinks.  The sunglasses are Ray-Banz, perfect down to the label on the side.  _Too easy._

He’s heard about limbo, even if he’s never been down here before.  It’s the fear at the back of every dreamer’s mind, the shade stalking their steps.  Limbo, the last shore.  The place where the lines aren’t just blurred, they don’t exist.  Anything you want in limbo, you have.  Anything you can dream, exists.

Steve rolls his shoulders, and decides to be careful.  _I know this is a dream,_ he thinks, taking his first steps off the beach and into the ruined city.  _I know this is a dream, I know it, I know it._

His footsteps echo, loud and lonely.  _I wonder whose dream this was?_ He’s only heard of a handful of people dropping down in here.  The Cobbs, Robert Fischer, Saito from Proculus Global.  A few military boys here and there, and once a young woman searching for her father. 

Who would build a city like this?

 _Not important, Rogers,_ he tells himself, casting around the corners of buildings nervously.  He has one job here, and that’s to find Clint and get the hell home. 

So where is Clint?

“Barton?” Steve calls, deciding to risk it.  “Hey, Barton!  Where are you?”

His voice echoes down the empty city.  Clint doesn’t call back. 

“If I was Barton,” Steve says to himself, “where would I go?”

The answer comes almost immediately.  Clint is the point man, the chessmaster.  He needs to be up high, where he can see everything and everyone. 

And the tallest building in sight is at the opposite end of the city, looming above everything else, sharp lines and ugly as sin.  Steve frowns.  It looks an awful lot like Stark Tower, a building that never existed anywhere but Tony’s mind.  (It was Tony’s favorite thing to dream, besides dreams where he could fly.  He returned to it again and again, almost as if visiting it could drag it into reality with him.) 

And it’s here. 

Every sense that Steve has screams _run away now, you moron!  Something’s wrong here!_ Every nerve strains to go back to the sea.  Danger prickles down his spine, as real as it was in the desert, as it was in Berlin. 

_Go back.  If you stay here, you’ll die._

Steve takes a deep breath and sets his feet on the path towards the building.  Everything in him protests violently, but Clint is there.   He can’t leave Clint. 

As he walks, the light grows dimmer and more contorted, bent by the broken buildings that curve over the sky like a ribcage stripped down to nothing but bare, gleaming bone and a few battered arties. 

“Creepy,” he mutters.  A dry, salty wind sweeps through the buildings, whistling like it did in the desert.  In the shadows, he sees flashes of movement, children kicking a soccer ball or a man with a gun, Bucky Barnes in all his uniformed glory, Peggy Carter with her eyes bright and laughing.

“This is a dream,” Steve tells himself.  “This is a dream, this is a dream.” 

 _Keep telling yourself that,_ he hears from the depths of the city, echoing and rustling off the fading walls.

The back of his neck prickles.  “It’s just paranoia,” he mutters. (He rests his thumb on his gun anyway, just to be safe.)  “They’re not real, and they’re not going to hurt me.”

And he’s right.  None of the projections even come close to him.  They just let him pass in silence, watching curiously.  They seem harmless, and he knows them, he knows Bucky and Peggy and Erskine, and Pepper too, with her red hair and her heels echoing in the corners of limbo.  He knows all of them, and he wants to talk to them.  See if they remember him, if they’re just insubstantial shades or maybe something more, drawn up from the depths of his mind.

But he can’t.  Steve knows how limbo works, how it gets its claws into you and doesn’t ever let you go.  Years will pass before he remembers himself, if he chooses to go with the projections and forget. 

Clint doesn’t have time for that. 

Steve picks up the pace, running from the projections and the sound of the sea.  They don’t chase him like normal projections do.  Small mercies, he guesses.  His totem rattles in his pocket, solid, noisy weight. 

He’s running through Brooklyn now, the alleys he got beat up in—he was a skinny kid, with a big mouth and an even bigger Napoleon complex—flashing by right next to all the places where he and Bucky ran wild and happy before bouncing back home.  It’s not exactly how he remembers it, but it’s real enough, it’s real enough. 

He goes through the desert next, a clutter of low-slung buildings the color of sand.  The air smells like sunshine and baking bread, with just a hint of sweat and blood.  Steve can feel the heat, and he runs on until he hits Rome, glorious Rome, the minotaur statue awake and dancing in the streets.  It prances, hooves heavy on the cobbled ground, and follows Steve all the way to the edges of Berlin with strands of unbloomed ivy hanging from its horns. 

Berlin is Berlin, dark and dank and cracked roadways.  The smell of it is heavy on his tongue and his lungs burn, fighting against that air.

(Another memory, hot and thick; _“He’s gone, Captain,” Phil Coulson says, pulling Steve’s hands away from Tony’s soaked chest.  “Steve, Steve, he’s gone.  He’s gone.  There’s nothing more you can do.”_

 _“He’s not dead,” Steve says, over and over again, helplessly.  “He’s not dead.  He’s not dead.”_ )

Stark Tower isn’t getting any closer.  Steve doesn’t know what he’s doing, running through all these layers of himself, but he _has_ to get to Stark Tower, he has to. 

As soon as he thinks it, he’s there.  He leaves everything behind and nearly runs into the glass walls, too startled to stop himself.  Berlin is a dark blur behind him and the tower soars up, clean light and sloping lines.

It’s a very Tony building. 

Everything in Steve tells him to go, to turn back.  He’s not safe here, he’s in danger.  He knows this feeling.  Somewhere in the back of his head, Tony says, _Shawarma._

Steve takes a deep breath, and steps into the building.

\-----

Three minutes left on Bruce’s clock, and he’s not there enough to care.  There’s a problem he has, whenever he dreams too long or too deeply.  He doesn’t talk about it, and the others know but they don’t talk about it either.

He thinks that they’re afraid of it.  Not that he can blame them.  It is pretty out there, even for a bunch of dreamers.

There’s an explanation for it, under layers and layers of self-worth issues and chemical experimentation and the dangers of trying your product on yourself first, but it’s been a long time and the true reason he is what he is is lost, even to him.  He couldn’t dig up _that_ secret if he tried.

What he is, though, is fucking _terrifying._ Tony called it awesome, whatever it is.  He thought it was fantastic, and maybe it is a little fantastic, this thing he can do in dreams.  But it’s dangerous, too. 

The thing is, Bruce Banner doesn’t _have_ projections, when he dreams.  He physically can’t conjure up his subconscious to fill a dreamspace.  It just doesn’t work.  He’s tried it, in a dozen, a hundred ways, but nothing he’s ever tried has fixed his problem.

Instead, he transforms.

Clint called it the Hungry-ass Ugly-fuck Large-ash-shit Killer.  Tony, and most of the others, affectionately referred to it as Bruce’s id.  Bruce himself just calls it the other guy, and never, ever talks about it, not even when he’s drunk.  He hates talking about it.  Talking about it means recognizing that it’s a part of himself, and he doesn’t want to do that _at all,_ thank you very much.  He doesn’t even want to know what exactly it is. 

Whatever it is, it’s huge, green, and very, very pissed off. 

The projections don’t stand a chance.  Bullets bounce of his skin.   Grenades roll off his back.  Fire and smoke sting his eyes, but don’t even slow him down.

Everything inside him twitches like a nerve, live and exposed and jumping with every little sound.  He roars, crushes projections beneath his massive hands, and the feeling of crunching bone doesn’t bother him.  It would bother Bruce, but there’s not enough left of him to be bothered. 

The id rampages, infuriated by the gunfire splashing against its sides and the thought Bruce called it with, the clear, ringing declaration, _Our friends are in danger._ Whatever the id is, whatever it feels, whatever it hates,  _fucking loves_ the rest of the team.   After the first disastrous few dreams together, when the other guy broke loose and killed all of them, just like a normal projection except enormous, they settled into a pattern where Natasha (who was scared of the id, even if she didn’t want to admit it, for reasons that Bruce _really does not want_ to consider) would carefully stay away, and Steve would tell the id where to go, and Tony would climb onto his shoulder like the fearless, reckless idiot he was and they’d rampage around fucking shit up while Clint perched ontop of things and shook his head like he was disappointed in all of them.

It worked.

The other guy wants them now.    Bruce isn’t awake to hear him—he can’t be, that’s the nature of his special brand of psychosis, the superego and the id cannot coexist—but the other guy is calling for them, searching, roaring their names.

Two minutes on the clock.  The building trembles, shuddering under the weight of the other guy’s fists and feet as he jumps, animal-like, and bounds up the side of the tower to hurl debris down at the projections swarming below. 

The string of grenades wavers in the air, shivering in the wind. 

Grenades tear holes in the building around him, and the other guy crunches on glass and kicks free, dropping three hundred feet to crater the pavement and grind projections to dust. 

One minute.  Music, faint and dim, starts to filter down from the sky.  _Retorna me…_

The other guy jumps again, this time hitting the building hard enough to rattle the string of grenades, and the sudden force of it pulls the pins free.  The little bombs drop, pinging off the pavement and detonating in cadence, one after the other and he clings to the side of the building, the clock ticking down somewhere deep in the part of the other guy that is Bruce Banner.

Thirty seconds.  A separate alarm reaches zero and triggers the music again, a faint crackle in Natasha’s ears.  The other guy hits the streets again, roaring, and sweeps aside a cluster of projections like they’re ants.  They hang onto his arms, swarming him, trying to take him down. 

Ten seconds.  Six people sleep high up in the building, nine, eight, and a hundred thousand crowd the streets, jumping on the other guy, weighing him down, trying to crush the fight out of him, seven, six.  Five, four, and the wind picks up in a thunderstorm, flashing a warning, a _get out, get out, something’s wrong here!_ (This subconscious has always been a very self-aware one.)  Three, two, and the other guy dies in a bloody roar, crushed beneath the weight of all these antibodies, and on the street corner a cracked marble statue splinters, an earthquake starting at its hooved feet. 

One, and the bombs in the building go off, dropping it down down down and Bruce Banner comes back to himself long enough to die, and the dream collapses to dust behind him.

 _All according to plan,_ he thinks, and falls down.

\-----

Natasha looks up at the ceiling, a frown creasing her face, and listens.  There, under the dull roar of the projections, she can hear a faint song. 

_Cara mia ti amo…_

Bruce’s signal.  It’s time.

Natasha smiles grimly, bracing her shoulder against the door as it rattles beneath her arms.  The projections figured out the Penrose loops five minutes ago.  They’re on her floor now, swarming every available space trying to get at her.

Unfortunately for them, she’s the dreamer, so she can drop whatever impossible architecture she wants on them, and that means rooms that get smaller and smaller and floors that suddenly don’t exist. 

The dream protests, but bends for her.

It’s just _not enough._

She bares her teeth, ducking past the door and squeezing off a clip in quick succession down the hallway.  Projections jerk and twitch in their scrubs, dropping to the floor.  Blood, bright red—always red, vivid in her dreams—seeps across the tiles, the color of roses. 

More projections keep coming, but that’s okay, that’s just fine.  There’s only a few minutes now. 

(Outside, blue-skinned projections, their skin breathtakingly intricate, tear at Steve’s wall.  The ivy, still heavy with unbloomed flowers, comes alive to fight them.) 

 _Retorna me….._  

\-----

An elevator takes Steve all the way up slowly, pinging softly to announce each floor.  Through the glass windows he can see glimpses of things, dreams he’s had before, places he’s seen, moments in time waiting for him to come back.

It makes him nervous, in a way he can’t explain.  He feels like he’s missing something here, something he once knew but chose to forget, and it _bothers_ him so bad he almost stops the elevator and sends it back down.

 _Just a little longer,_ he says.  _I just have to get Clint and then everything will be okay._

The elevator _pings_ to a stop on the eighty-ninth floor, one before the top.  Steve frowns and punches the glowing ninety again, then again when the elevator doesn’t move.

It pings again, sounding, if possible, a little annoyed that he’s not getting the hint.

Steve sighs, mutters a “well _fuck me,_ ” and gets out of the elevator.

The doors slide shut behind him and the elevator rattles down out of sight.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it probably isn’t coming back. 

Steve takes a deep breath, squaring his shoulders, and sets off in search of some stairs. 

(He draws his gun, just to be safe.)

Floor eighty-nine isn’t all that impressive, considering that it could be whatever it wants to be (or he wants it to be?  He’s still not sure if that’s what happening, if he’s filling limbo up, even if he doesn’t mean to) and it just looks like office space, uniform, gray, and bland.

All the cubicles are empty.  There are bits of paper scattered here and there, some overturned coffee cups, a lonely pen left on a keyboard. 

No one else is in the office.  Steve cautiously makes his way forward, trying to place this place, to remember where it comes from.  It’s familiar and that’s an issue, because he’s never worked an office job in his life. 

“Hello?”  he calls, circling a cluster of cubicles.  “Clint?  Barton, where are you?”

No response.  Well shit.  Steve licks his lips and stops moving. He knows what this is.  If it’s like a normal dream—and limbo is a dream, just, well, _more_ —this part will be a maze.  Something that he recognizes but doesn’t know well enough to get lost in.  A defense mechanism.

 _But whose?_ says a wary little voice in the back of his head that makes him think of statues and flowers.  _Whose dream is this?  Clint’s?_

 _Has to be,_ he decides, picking his way carefully towards another cluster of cubicles.  He just needs a vantage point where he can see the whole maze, a desk to stand on or something.  That’s all there is to it.  Mazes aren’t hard to solve, once you know what you’re doing.  You just have to know you’re in one. 

He jumps on top of a cubicle wall easily, and makes the mistake of looking down.

Steve nearly falls off the wall.

Erskine’s body lies in a lawn chair in the space where a desk would normally be, his eyes blown wide and one hand tucked against his chest, the other dangling limply a few inches off the ground.  There’s a bullet hole in his head, neat and dripping.

This is how he looked in Berlin, when Steve jerked awake as the dream fell to pieces down below.   His skin, when Steve brushes it impulsively, is still warm.

 _Just a dream,_ the extractor says, swallowing bile.  _This is just a dream._

He straightens, balancing on the wall, and doesn’t look down.  The maze spreads in all directions, farther than it should, a winding knot of cubicles and narrow hallways, not a stairwell or an elevator in sight. 

Figures.  He probably couldn’t find his way back if he tried, that’s how this maze is designed. 

 _How do I get out of here?_ Mazes usually have a mathematical logic to them, in the placement of pathways and walls and dead ends, but Steve doesn’t know the algorithm.  This is Stark Tower, after all, and he never could quite get the grasp of Tony’s math.

Somewhere, deep in the maze, he can hear the sound of rushing water. 

Steve frowns.  What the hell is water doing in an office building?  Carefully, so he doesn’t disturb Erskine’s body (so he doesn’t have to look at it, really), Steve clambers down and sets off towards the sound.

Cubicle walls block him more often than not, but the great thing about a maze made in an office is that you can kind of just kick the walls down. 

Steve gets closer and closer to the sound of water.  Along the way, he sees Pepper, sprawled in her lawn chair in the middle of the hallway, her face peaceful.  She hadn’t been awake when she died.  Small mercies. 

Steve turns around and picks another path rather than disturb her. 

Finally, he spots the source of the noise—a fountain, Roman, cracked, bruised marble and magnificent.  Theseus slays the minotaur carelessly, grief inherent in the lines of his carved face.  He has the minotaur at swordpoint and water weeps from the “wounds,” and spills from the minotaur’s mouth and Theseus’s eyes. 

Strands of thick ivy wrap the fountain, trailing off between chairs and desks and Peggy’s pale, still legs.  The sight of her makes Steve’s chest pound, in a way it hasn’t in a while. 

He doesn’t look at her, but guilt coats his tongue.

“I don’t suppose you know the way out,” he tells the minotaur tiredly. 

To his surprise, the minotaur fucking _blinks._

Steve, predictably, shoots it in the head.  “What the _fuck,_ ” he snarls, but the statue, water leaking from a new hole in his forehead, just shakes off the bullet and points down a hallway, past Peggy. 

“You’re shitting me.”

The minotaur gives him a sad, shaking look, and lies back down beneath Theseus’s sword.  It stills, and doesn’t move again.

“This isn’t happening to me,” Steve says, sidestepping the statue.  Water soaks the floor, beads up around his shoes.  “You’re fucking kidding me, out of all the crazy shit that’s happened so far—”

Peggy doesn’t move—she’s dead, she’s dead—but a single flower, pale white and trembling (the devil’s trumpet, his mother’s favorite), blooms in her hand. 

Steve isn’t aware of choosing to walk over to it, just that he does and he’s there, and she’s cool and still but her eyes are open, and there are moonflowers in her hands, in the ivy that winds from the minotaur’s feet all the way through the maze.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, shutting Peggy’s eyes tenderly.  “I’m so sorry for what happened to you.”

She doesn’t respond, not that he expected her to.  She’s dead, after all.

Steve takes a deep breath, and follows the ivy.  He hopes it’ll pay off.  As he goes, the flowers bloom for him, winking white eyes, and then whither as soon as he passes.  Petals fill the maze and the sound of water fades, and Steve swallows, suddenly more afraid than ever.

(He’s seen Erskine’s body, and Pepper’s, and Peggy’s.  He knows who’s next.)

The ivy leads him to a stairwell, funnily enough.  It winds up the railings and deep into the steps, into the foundations and Steve can see it run all the way down.  Everything is wrapped in ivy, and when he pokes it, flowers bloom and shy away from his hands.  They’re pale, just like his hands.

He starts to climb.  This isn’t a Penrose loop, he can tell right away.  He knows those, and this isn’t one of them.  It’s just a stairwell covered in ivy, like something he’d find in the old corners of Rome or in some forgotten dream he’d dreamed before all of this, before the joy of dreaming faded to the grind of work. 

He climbs, and opens an ivy-wreathed door labeled _ninety._

“Barton?”

\-----

The charges aren’t going to go off fast enough.  She underestimated the projections.  They’re clever, and they’ve figured out that she’s just one person, and the more of them there are, the less effective she is.

The problem with Natasha is that she’s a close fighter.  She can take on ten men at once but she has to be _close_ to them, and the projections are close, sure, but there’s more of them who aren’t close and they’re an issue.

Her door is splinters now, hanging on by its hinges.  Bullet holes decorate the wall and _retorna me_ rattles off the walls obnoxiously, loud and persistent. 

She bares her teeth.  She still has two minutes on the clock, and she’s not going to make it that long, the projections are going to rip her and the three people hooked up to the PASIV to shreds.

 _Running out of options here,_ she thinks, casting around for a solution, a way out.

She doesn’t see one.

A projection, Laufey the Frost Giant, huge and tall and intricately carved, comes roaring down the hallway, his teeth bared in a battle-grin. 

He’s going to kill her, isn’t he.

Natasha sighs.  She really, really, _really_ wishes they had just left her in the dreaming dens or something.  This isn’t how she imagined this going down.

Oh well.  There’s not much she can do about it now.

She very calmly raises her gun to her own head, and fires once.

(Outside on the broken wall, the strands of ivy waver, burst into pale moonflowers and flowers erupt from the minotaur’s chest, soak the garden in white petals. 

Then, the dream collapses, and she’s gone.)

\-----

Clint Barton turns around, and Steve thinks he might actually pass out, he’s so relieved. Clint’s alive.  He’s alive and he’s perched on top of this building like he owns it, studying the world below, and it’s such a Clint move that he’s got to be okay.

Steve grins, and steps forward with his hand outstretched, ready to take Clint home, and an arrow buries itself in Clint’s forehead and he drops like a stone.

“ _What_ the—” he spins, squeezing off a shot that bounces harmlessly off the wall, clattering to the concrete roof, and Clint Barton comes prowling from the shadows with a bow, knocked and ready, at his side.

Steve stops moving.

“What the hell,” he breathes.  Clint Barton’s lying dead behind him with an arrow in his brain, but he’s also shambling towards him with that lazy, sloping walk Clint has, that Steve mostly forgot about until now.

“Hi,” Clint says cheerfully.  “Was wondering when you were going to show up.  I was getting bored.”

“How—?”  he turns to look at the body, and now that he _looks_ at it, really looks at it, there’s something off.  Clint’s face is too smooth.  His shoulders just a bit too narrow.  He’s missing a few inches, and his wide, startled eyes are the wrong shade of blue. 

A projection.

“Oho, look at you, figuring it out,” Clint says with a grin, showing all of his teeth.  “Yep, that’s a projection.”

“Why’d you shoot it?”  Steve can barely wrap his head around all of this.  Nothing’s making sense.  _Whose limbo is this?_ he thinks, and reaches for his totem.

“It was going to get in the way,” Clint hums easily, shouldering his bow again.  “They tend to do that, down here in limbo.  Weird, right?” 

“I don’t understand,” Steve says, trying to catch up.  “Why would you make a projection of yourself?”

“Oh, he wasn’t my projection, big guy.”

“What do you mean by that?” Steve almost asks, but he’s interrupted by the door swinging open and Natasha Romanoff stalks in, dragging a body that looks jarringly like her own.  Another projection, and when Steve takes a second to look, he can pick out the imperfections in the design, the little flaws and mistakes that make her distinguishable from the real Natasha.

He frowns, and something deep inside himself withers, and something else comes awake.  (Steven Rogers is a smart man.  He’s not a genius, not like Tony, but he can figure things out, even if he doesn’t want to.

He really, really doesn’t want to.)

“Natasha,” he says, disbelieving, and looks between her and Clint.  “Guys?  What’s going on?”

Neither of them get to answer because the door bangs open again and Bruce stumbles out, shaking his head like a dog trying to get rid of water, his clothes a little ripped and bloody but otherwise unhurt.  As far as Steve can tell, he’s not a projection either.

“What?” Bruce says defensively, as everyone turns to look at him.  “I’m not late or anything, right?”

“No,” Natasha says, shaking her head.

“Almost though,” Clint laughs.  “How’d things go for you guys, mm?  Everything go according to plan?”

“Yeah,” Bruce says.  “At least, I think so.  I wasn’t exactly, uh, aware the whole time.  The dream collapsed right on schedule, though.  I brought the tower down.”

“I had to end it two minutes early,” Natasha mutters crossly, spinning her totem—a chesspiece, Steve doesn’t think he’s ever noticed that before, and when did her hair get that _long_ —carelessly.  “We underestimated the projections a little bit, I think.  The designs weren’t complicated enough.”

“Hey,” Steve cuts in, because he still doesn’t know what’s going on but he can recognize an insult when he sees it.  “I built those levels!”

Natasha gives him a _look._ “That’s the problem,” she says. 

Steve opens his mouth, about to snap a retort, then closes it again.  He doesn’t know what to say. 

“Yeah, thought that might happen,” Clint mutters, scratching his head thoughtfully.  “The Penrose loops were a nice touch, but they were always going to slip through.  Intelligent fuckers.  That’s the problem with working with a trained subconscious.”

“You’re telling me,” Bruce says.  “I had to use the other guy.  I _never_ have to use the other guy.  I’m going to be feeling that for _days._ ”

“You do know this is just a dream, right?”  Natasha says, fondly.  “Nothing that happens to us down here actually exists up there.”

Bruce snorts.  “Of course I know that.  That’s the whole reason we’re in this mess, isn’t it?”

“The whole reason we’re in this mess,” Clint pipes up, cheerfully, “is because we’re soft, crazy loyal idiots and when we got the call, we threw all caution to the wind and decided to come.”

“We were always going to come,” Natasha says, shaking her head.  Clint nods, the lines around his eyes wrinkling.  “Like we were going to stay away, after everything.”

“What are you guys talking about?”  Steve says, still not understanding, and they ignore him. 

“Still, I’m impressed with us,” Clint hums, smiling crookedly.  “We did a damn good job.  I don’t think I’ve had to work this hard at something in like three years.” 

“Show-off,” Bruce grumbles.  “You know how much I hate dreaming.”

“Baby,” Clint retorts.

Natasha shakes her head.  “Children,” she mutters.

“ _Hey!”_ Steve shouts, pitching his voice like he used to in the war, about gunfire and screaming and whistling sand.  It’s his _listen to me right the fuck now_ voice, and it gets results.

His three teammates spin around, hands going for weapons, before they realize it was him who shouted and relax. 

“We’re listening,” Clint says breezily, stance loose and friendly.  Natasha smiles.  Bruce blinks, sheepish and apologetic.

“Sorry,” the chemist says, hands spread appealingly.  “You know how we get.  Throw us together and we just don’t stop going, right?”

“I thought you were a bit more professional than that,” Steve snaps, and Clint laughs.

“You _want_ us to be more professional than that,” he says.  “There’s a difference, Cap.  We’re never going to be what you want.”

Steve frowns.  “What’s going on?”  he asks, low and intent.  His fingers itch for his gun.  This is limbo, right?  This is what it does to you.  It takes the familiar and it twists it, bends it, blurs the lines until they don’t exist.  “What is this?”

“This,” says Tony Stark, “is an intervention, sweetheart.”   

Steve stares.  He can’t help it.  He feels disconnected, somehow, like he’s been plucked from his body and there’s just a shell behind, a shade of the man who was once Steve Rogers.  (For a moment, limbo flickers, torn between what it was and what it is, and he feels, inexplicably, as though he’s a hundred years old.)

“Deep breaths,” Tony says briskly, stalking through Natasha and Bruce and Clint.  They don’t try and stop him, not even Natasha, who put a bullet in his head two levels up without even breaking a sweat.  Clint even says, “About time you showed up, Stark,” to which Tony grins and slaps the man on the shoulder.

“I don’t understand,” Steve says helplessly.  “What’s going on?  Guys, what is this?  What’s—what’s happening?  Why aren’t you doing anything?  Tony’s a shade.  He’s dead.  I saw him die.  I _saw you die,_ Tony.  I held you in my arms.”

“Oh, baby,” Tony says, coming close, so close, his hands solid and warm and real.  He balances on his toes, leans in to Steve’s neck so Steve can smell him, hot metal, sweat, and cologne.  His heart tightens.  Is this how Tony really smelled?  Is this how he felt?  Steve can’t remember, not right, not anymore.  Tony brings his mouth to Steve’s ear, so close his breath tickles.  He whispers, “Oh, baby, what if I told you that it’s all just been a bad dream?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy _crap_ that was a long time coming. I have literally been trying to drop hints and not spoil anything SINCE CHAPTER TWO, OH MY GOD.


End file.
